


the twilight of your eyes

by 1derspark



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: (it's not Joe or Nicky), Alternate Universe - Pacific Rim Fusion, Angst, Brief suicidal thoughts, Character Death, Fluff, Giant Robots, Giant monsters, M/M, Rating Changed, Sci-Fi, Smut, Trauma, it's a kaiju party and Joe and Nicky are the headliners, nicky is kind of feral in this not gonna lie
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-19
Updated: 2020-09-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 22:33:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 23,389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25982905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1derspark/pseuds/1derspark
Summary: “Only four of you will pass into the heart of a Jaeger,” she says, voice clean and cold as stone. “And even then, the chances are that three of you will not live to see the next year. Do with that what you will.”Andy stops before Joe, meets his eyes and does not flinch.“But don’t you dare not give this fight anything less than your all,” she says.From beyond her shoulder is Nicky, his face blank, so far removed from the feral fighting thing Joe tangled swords with last night. His impassivity bites through the bone of Joe more than anything ever has, or ever will.The lightning-bright blood of a kaiju is child’s play to the fight in his eyes and this, not the beasts from the electric deep, will be my undoing.(Or the Pacific Rim AU no one asked for)
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nicky | Nicolò di Genova & Quynh | Noriko, Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Minor or Background Relationship(s)
Comments: 183
Kudos: 518





	1. There are things you can't fight, acts of God.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, I am TOG trash, and one day I was listening to the Pacific Rim soundtrack (I very much suggest listening to "Canceling the Apocalypse" by Ramin Djawadi while reading this) and I could not stop writing. 
> 
> This will be my first WIP in years, but I'm in a groove rn so hopefully, this gets done pretty quickly. I have the fic outlined and parts of the second chapter done so pray for me, everyone. 
> 
> A big thank you to Butts, Madi, and Kellin from the Discord who read this over for me. You guys are awesome.
> 
> Enjoy!

By the year 2019, there is not one person on planet Earth who can predict the paths of the kaiju with any kind of solid certainty. 

The war that everyone agrees should have been concluded two years ago rages on in the form of ambiguity. The monsters that arise from a crackling trench in the Pacific mutate with a speed that would amaze Darwin and all the biologists who study the evolution of species. 

But this is not their species, biology to the Kaiju means nothing. And that’s not the important part anyway.

This is.

In early April of 2019, a monster named Phantom somehow slips out beyond the borders of the Pacific Ocean and makes its way up the coast of West Africa, blasting through any of the meager defenses erected in response.

On April 13th it reaches the mouth of the Mediterranean. 

On May 4th Yusuf al-Kaysani walks along the coastline of the Bay of Tunis with his mother and sister, unaware that it will be the last time he will ever do so. 

~

When the kaijus come, all the water in the world goes out to sea.

Tsunamis in the Mediterranean are less common than in the larger oceans. The cities nestled in the crown of the Ring of Fire have known their fair share of them. The tectonic plates, the slumbering volcanoes of old, the angry vents in the sea. Earth is forever changing, forever shifting, and in another hundred million years the planet will look much different, thanks to this.

Though no one expected some giant neon Godzilla looking fuckers to be the face of change in this era. 

It was alien, as the kaiju were themselves, but not wholly without its consistencies.

Everyone who has survived a kaiju attack, if you can get them to repeat it, will spin you a tale with these three kinds of commonalities.

One: when a kaiju comes, the first thing you see are the bare bones of the seabed of your harbor.

Two: The water grows dark with the bulk of the creature’s body.

Three: You start running.

In Tunis they have started on their wall. It was only three weeks ago that Phantom trickled unawares into the Mediterranean and laid waste to Valencia, stalking the Southern coast of Europe until it reached Barcelona, Monaco, and Genoa. It was making a clean sweep of the Italian sealine, and while their country burned, and the world ran itself into hysterics because _they can jump oceans now,_ Tunis thanked whatever paranoid government official it was that decided to start on a wall project very much prematurely.

It wasn’t done, but it was a shadow of a comfort at least, the foundation spikes spread tall and high over the Gulf, sheets of dark metal (the same they used for the Jaegers) strung like a net between them. And so there was less panic in Tunis as there might have been in other coastal cities. 

Maybe if they hadn’t trusted the wall, trusted that metal and concrete could keep them safe from the monsters rising from the deep, the damage done would have been less.

But Joe learns soon that it is best not to dwell on “what ifs.” 

What if they had evacuated the city? What if they’d stayed home that day? What if he had run faster? What if.

Joe is with his mother and sister, down in the commune of Carthage. His sister likes the archeological sites, and his mother, who is stir-crazy after languishing about in bed recovering from a nasty bout of flu, desires nothing more than to be outside in the salty sea air in one of the most beautiful parts of the city. 

Joe needs it too, he’d spent the past week caring for his mother, finishing up some commissioned paintings for customers. He even met with his uncle to spar with the scimitars, swords that have been in his family for centuries, and Joe was the most talented with them out of all the al-Kaysani sons. 

They’re down by the marina, and Joe’s planning another training session in his mind, his mother chastising him for daydreaming, when it happens. 

After Joe’s obligatory fifteen seconds of stalled shock, when the water rushes out and people stop to gawk at it, there’s a sudden blasting siren booming through the air. 

He snatches up his sister, who is eleven and far too old to be carried, but what does it matter _now,_ grabs his mother’s hand and _runs_ for higher ground.

It’s really no use, but what else can he do? He runs and runs and runs, his sister making creaky wailing sounds into the crook of his neck, his mother’s hand slips between his fingers more times than he can count. He jogs back to haul her up, her hands as shaky as the beat of his heart, but the water catches up to them anyway.

He dares not look back. He can hear enough. The roar of the muddy surf, muddled with the ripped up remains of the city, and the screeching of the kaiju behind it. The ever-constant sound of shattering glass when it makes landfall. 

He doesn’t look back so when the water comes he doesn’t see it until he’s already under. 

It’s a bone-shattering smack to the back, and in an instant his mother and his sister are gone and he’s become nothing but a rush of painful sensations.

Lungs burning. Leg aching. Eyes itching. Muscles weakening. He fights for air but does not know which way is up. Everything is black, black, black. He has never swum before in water this cruel. 

Joe does not know how it happens, even if you ask him later, many years later, he will go tight around the mouth and shrug, but somehow he gets to the surface and washes up on the roof of a crumbling house, the water swirling in a dark torrent around him.

There is a burning agony in his leg in the form of an elongated gash running up from his ankle to his knee, and he has barely enough consciousness to pull himself up to the roof’s highest point but when he does, he almost wishes that he drowned. 

Later, he wishes he had. 

He vomits up four mouthfuls of dirty poisoned water, and when the wetness in his eyes clears up enough he looks out to the city.

Descended upon Tunis like a poltergeist, a kaiju, category four, tears through their wondrous sea wall like tissue paper and lays waste to the city with its claws, its bulk, the maw of its glowing gaping mouth, a crown of purple frills strung about its neck in a decorative ruffle.

It’s comical, looking at the footage later, watching this overgrown lizard in a clown’s getup destroy one of the oldest cities in the world. Was this not once Carthage? A colony that became an empire? Did Yusuf not walk the columns of its ruins, still standing after so long? He doubts they’re standing now.

Some laugh at it all, the absurdity of it. But when Joe watches it from the roof, bleeding out, his mother and sister lost to the deafening rush of the water Phantom brought, all that he does is sob.

~

After a month of searching for his family’s bodies and coming up with nothing like so many of the other refugees the citizens of Tunis have become, he returns to the wreckage of his house, collects what’s left, takes his uncle’s scimitar, and books a flight to Hong Kong. Where he signs up for the Jaeger program as soon as he lands.

~

In Hong Kong there are a thousand men and women like him.

The Shatterdome is a wasp’s nest of tragedies, burned into the hearts of orphans and widows, people who’ve searched for their families bodies in the ruins of concrete the kaiju left behind until their hands bled, and their nails ripped off with the desperation of it.

There are also the keyed up adrenaline junkies who’ve come in pairs. Twins, brothers, best friends, who’ve watched the Jaeger fights on the news and played them out for fun in the schoolyard.

They make for cocky assholes, the kind of squirmy white-toothed pilots Joe’s seen on talk shows, who are too keen to repeat every single detail of their match fights. But who won’t speak one word of what to do with the kaiju, its carcass rotting away on the city’s ruins.

But the Jaeger program isn’t looking for a sob story or a cocky jock, all they want are two people who can meet in the bridge between man and metal, and dole out another casualty-free smackdown with little to no property damage.

Efficiency comes over everything.

Joe is a nice person, he’s friendly, extroverted. Even now, with the heavy stone of grief in his stomach, he can’t resist talking to people. On the helicopter ride to the Shatterdome he starts an easy banter with a couple of the recruits over the intercoms, even though the wind and rain make it almost impossible for anyone to hear anything.

By the time they’ve landed on the outer deck he’s already made friends, maybe even drift partners. He walks into the facility with higher hopes than he had before.

Only when they all line up to be counted outside in the biting rain, given identification numbers and dorm assignments, he catches a flash of movement just inside the lip of the bay doors.

A man, drenched in rainwater, wielding what looks like a longsword, spars with a woman on a makeshift basketball court, and with every blow he deflects, he screams bloody murder.

It’s archaic, swinging a sword around in this hub of buzzing metal and electricity, filled wall to wall with intricately engineered robots. Joe is mesmerized. He fingers at his uncle’s scimitar, strapped to his hip. The last thing in the world he has of his family. What would this man do should he unsheathe it? Charge into the fray of their match?

He knocks the woman down with a high kick then meets her strikeback with a clash of steel. She’s got him locked down with a _labrys_ of all things, gritting her teeth in a furious smile, when the man catches Joe’s eyes.

It only lasts a second, their connection, but it’s enough.

He’s beautiful, and riotous, a muse of a man if Joe’s ever seen one. His eyes alone merritt a thousand years of ballads.

_They’re a burning green-gray. Like a warning sign. My warning sign. They’re Greek fire on the blackwater, eating up all the molecules of the world, until there’s nothing left to burn._

There’s a crash, and the woman disarms him. His longsword clatters to the floor, the labrys is held just over the pale delicate skin of his throat. The man glares at his partner but all she does is chuckle, and smirk Joe’s way.

Joe startles at her face, he recognizes her _now,_ Andromache the fucking Scythian but before Joe can say anything, do anything, the recruiter has them all marching up to their dorms.

He’s left with only a moment to stare, as the man picks up his sword again and with a flash of silver, goes back in for the kill.

  
  


~

The man’s name is Nicolo, though he goes by Nicky. And while he’s been at the Shatterdome for only one month, he’s already made a name for himself. 

One, it helps that he was toted into the program by Andy and Quynh, pilots of the renowned Immortal Guard. It was a Mark One behemoth, one of the few nuclear powered Jager’s still standing, and it was rare that it ever bore more than a scratch.

Andy and Quynh were the oldest pilots in the program, and from the newsreels anyone could see they partnered better than anyone else. They have nothing but successful kill after kill after kill under their belt.

All except for Phantom, jumper of seas. They were the team to finally take him down in Cairo. But for many, that was too late. Two Jaegers and four pilots were torn apart in the mad dash across the Mediterranean before Andy and Quynh could finish the job.

Nicky, it seems, they picked up in Genoa. 

How? No one will say, the only words they have to spare for the Italian are both admiring and cautious like he’s some ghost no one can catch and figure out.

He trains all day, he never eats in the cafeteria, he disappears at night.

His bunk is right across from Joe’s, his name labeled and stamped down to the door like everyone else’s, but Joe’s never seen him there.

In the three days that they’re given to settle in before the drift compatibility trials begin, Joe spends every free minute he has looking for him, only to catch him once by accident.

He was training with some of the recruits. Joe has taken to an American woman named Nile, who’s sweet and sarcastic, wicked with a pistol, who’s always fingering the gold cross at her throat. Joe spends a good hour teaching her how to use the scimitar, going through the basic forms, until she can’t hold up the hilt any longer.

Coming out from the gym, freshly showered, the sword slung about his waist he hears Andy and Nicky in a side corridor, speaking in harsh, hurried whispers.

“I deserve it Andy,” Nicky hisses. “More than anyone else here. I fight better. I train better. I’m ten times better than these recruits.”

“You are,” Andy says. “I don’t care. You can’t handle it.”

Nicky gets up in her face, almost until they’re nose to nose. It’s more than Joe has ever seen anyone ever do to her. One did not challenge Andromache the Scythian.

“You don’t know that.” His voice drips with rage, pain. His fists are clenched and shaking at his side, like he wants to hit her, hit something.

“No I don’t, but I won’t take the risk,” she says and walks away.

Nicky’s squeezed his eyes shut, falls forward into the wall and leans there breathing heavy through his mouth. 

Joe can’t help but move forward, to do what, he doesn’t know, but he remembers that drawn out second they shared yesterday. The brutality of Nicky’s face, it looked like the world ended in his eyes. He walked on the edge of something darker, but something kept him lingering.

Nicky’s head shot up, his hearing must be very good, Joe barely makes a sound. His hair hangs over his forehead in a sweaty fringe, and his pupils are blown, he looks like a predator, cornered.

“You,” he says all rough in the throat. “I saw you yesterday. You came in with the new ones.”

“Yes,” Joe says. “I saw you fight.”

Nicky rises to his full height. Stalks forward so there’s only a couple inches between them. He’s an inch shorter than Joe, maybe, they’d fit perfectly, symmetrically, should they embrace. 

“And what did you see?” Nicky asks.

_Green fire. A strong arm. The most beautiful man in the world._

“I saw you,” Joe says. “And all the things you deserve but cannot have.” He reaches for the scimitar at his hip, unsheathes it and watches the light bounce off the sheen onto Nicky’s face, making him a silver moon.

“My name is Joe. Do you want to spar?”

When Nicky grins he grins wide, with all his teeth, and in it lies Joe’s downfall.

~

On day four, all 100 of them are hustled into the sparring room for the drift compatibility trials, and Joe might just fall asleep. 

Nile nudges him in the shoulder with her elbow when his chin dips down low nodding off.

“What the hell Joe,” she grits at him through her teeth. “Did I tire you out or something old man?”

Nevermind that she’s twenty-five and Joe just started pushing his mid-thirties, he shoots her a cool if lazy grin.

“If I recall, it was you who copped out after an hour, Nile.” he says. 

“Yeah and my arms hurt like a bitch but I’m not nodding off at what will probably be one of the most important moments of my life.”

Joe thinks he and Nile have very different ideas of what important means. Important is staying up until four in the morning, clashing swords with Nicky without pause, without break. How many times last night had he gotten close enough to Nicky’s face that he could study every mole, every pore, every iridescent shade of his iris. How many times did Nicky snarl and push back, hacking down and down until Joe circled him again, only to dive back in for more.

Nicky nicked him on the thigh with his sword, and that was the first time Joe had seen the fire in his eyes dim, if only for a few minutes.

“Joe,” Nicky said, sword clattering to the ground, forgotten. He’d come and put his hand over the dripping gash on Joe’s leg, bunching up the fabric of Joe’s sweatpants so that the blood clotted. 

“I hurt you,” he said, shocked as if it’s been a long time since he cared for hurting anyone. “I’m sorry.”

“We were fighting with sharpened blades Nicky, these things happen,” Joe laughed out, just a bit breathless with the pain but mostly from Nicky’s hand, a hot brand on his thigh.

“You, you want to keep going?” Nicky asked hesitantly.

Joe stood, judging the tenderness of his leg, and when it only twinged he grabbed Nicky’s sword and held it out as an offering.

“We will fight until you earn a scar as well,” he said. “It’s only fair.”

When Nicky walks in the training room, trailing behind Andy, Quynh and a dark-skinned man Joe does not recognize, if you look closely, there was the slightest hitch in his step.

And when Andy reaches the raised platform overlooking the sparring mats Nicky is leaning just a bit more onto his right side.

On his left, in a neat shallow slice across his shin is a cut bearing the mark of Joe’s scimitar, hidden beneath his pant leg.

~

“There are one hundred of you here today,” says Andromache the Scythian, parading down the lines they’ve formed on two sides of the room, inspecting them like one does cattle, like one would a stallion who remains wild and unbroken. Joe thinks she means to break them just a bit, if only to harness that ferocity into the clean swipe of a sword the size of a skyscraper.

“Only four of you will pass into the heart of a Jaeger,” she says, voice clean and cold as stone. “And even then, the chances are that three of you will not live to see the next year. Do with that what you will.”

Andy stops before Joe, meets his eyes and does not flinch. 

“But don’t you dare not give this fight anything less than your all,” she says. 

From beyond her shoulder is Nicky, his face blank, so far removed from the feral fighting thing Joe tangled swords with last night. His impassivity bites through the bone of Joe more than anything ever has, or ever will. 

_The lightning-bright blood of a kaiju is child’s play to the fight in his eyes and this, not the beasts from the electric deep, will be my undoing._

“Now,” Andy says, raises her arms high to the platform and gestures at the black man. “Copley take it away.”

Copley calls the first name.

~

Nile fights well. Much better than most of the other recruits. She’s a surprise to her opponents, who underestimate her based on her size and kind face, more than once she flips a man to the floor in the first thirty seconds. 

She remains unbeaten until Andy comes down and fights Nile herself.

This fight lasts longer, three minutes maybe. All the recruits lean in to watch wide-eyed as Andy throws a punch, Nile catches it, twists Andy’s arm to lock her down only to fall with Andy’s kick to her shin. 

Andy wins, but she’s broken a sweat.

Quynh’s clapping for her partner up on the platform and Copley’s typing something wildly on his touchpad. 

Nicky’s glaring a hole into the back of her head.

~

When Joe fights, he does even better. He makes his way through a dozen people before he turns to Andy who stands on the platform, looking down at all them like some warrior queen. Joe points the butt of his sparring stick at Nicky. 

“Give me a real fight Andromache,” he says loud and clear. “I will fight Nicolo.”

Nicky looks up, shock written plainly on his face, turns from Joe to Andy, looking just about a second from dropping to his knees and begging.

“Fight me then,” Andy counters, a wry smile on her face.

“No,” Joe says. “You’ll win. And I don’t want to win. I want a drift partner.”

He straightens himself up and keeps himself level with her gaze. It takes effort, as he is not Nicolo spitting all his righteous rage in her face without a second thought. It feels like he’s asking for more than a fight from her, it feels like he’s taking something. 

Though Nicky is no one’s to take.

The tension in the room is thick and quiet, then Quynh breaks out into giggles, laughing so hard she clutches at her stomach and doubles over with it.

Andy’s looking at her like she’s suddenly sprouted ten heads.

“You’re a fighter aren’t you, Yusuf al-Kaysani,” Quynh says once she’s caught her breath. She comes over to Andy’s side, leans over the railing and gifts him a soft smile.

“You deserve a kindred spirit.” She turns to Nicky who’s been watching them all with wide, dazzling eyes. 

“Go on now Nicky, best not to keep the handsome man waiting.”

~

When Joe was five, his uncle showed him the family heirlooms. Twin shining scimitars, with gold plated handles, crafted from the same steel by the same blacksmith maybe two hundred years ago and gifted to the al-Kaysani patriarch.

His uncle was a professor of history at the university, and he could go on for hours about the deep-rooted heritage of Tunisia and the Maghrib. The cradle of empires. The conquerors of Carthage, their armadas’ sails spread wide to the winds of the sea and the lands beyond. 

His uncle's body is the only one he ever sees. Laid out in the sun to rot, pale and lifeless, lined up with the rest of the dead for the living to identify.

When he went back to the bones of his house that the waters had picked clean, he could only find the one sword. He searched for days, picking out shiny things in the muck in the faint hope that he could save one of the few things his family owned and loved just as much as they did each other.

Joe never found it, and drifted away, lost and untethered from the city of his ancestors. A single part of a lost pair. But in a gym in Hong Kong when Nicky comes down and sets an offensive stance to face his opponent, Joe has one thought before they clash forwards.

_I found it._

~

They finish with Nicky’s sparring stick to his throat. Joe’s pressed to the soft flesh of Nicky’s abdomen. An even three to three rounds won between them, breathing hard, their chests rising and falling in synchronization.

The room is deathly silent.

Nicky swallows and steps back, turns to Andy whose mouth is pursed in a thin white line.

“We have two pilots then,” she says, her mouth curled with bitterness on each word.

The room erupts into applause. Nile looks like she’ll break a damn finger with how hard she’s clapping. Up on the platform, Quynh puts a gentle hand on Andy’s shoulder only for it to be brushed away while Andy strides off into the hallway.

A few people have come over to pat Joe on the back, squeeze his arm in congratulations, in jealousy, in awe. But he doesn’t really feel it.

Nicky comes close and grabs the sides of Joe’s face with his hands, smoothes a gentle thumb up from the softness of his neck, and through the thickness of his beard. He brings their foreheads together so that they’re brushing, touching, just enough to satisfy, just beyond the propriety of the room.

“Thank you,” Nicky whispers between them, wrecked and grateful, though Joe knows not what for. He did what he thought had to be done. Here lays his kindred soul, the twin of his sword. He’s lost it once, and will never lose it again.

He tucks Nicky into an embrace, cradles a hand up into his sweaty hair, and holds him tight, tight, tight.

“Let’s get to work,” he says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come check me out on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/1derspark)! I'm currently accepting prompts so if you have a TOG idea you can drop me one of those too, or just come and say hi :)
> 
> As always comments and kudos keep me going and feed the beast!


	2. You see a hurricane coming, you have to get out of the way.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The drift comes with answers, unwanted and without consent, a sacrifice in its blue bloody palms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this story might end up being four chapters, not three. This got much longer than I anticipated. Idk, we'll see.
> 
> Enjoy guys!

Their Jaeger is outfitted in a joint collaboration between the countries of Italy and Tunisia. 

It’s not something that’s common. Usually, the one country would rather plunge a hundred billion dollars into one single Jaeger they own to call back and patrol its vulnerable waters.

(But more often than not the Jaeger’s move around the world wherever they’re needed. Home for a Jaeger, for its pilots, is the ear-shattering scream of the surf, the comforting clanking of a shatterdome, the taste of blood and metal in the mouth.)

But with two fresh-faced drift partners with no previous loyalties but to the countries, the cities, they once called home, there had little foundation to build upon their Jaeger but that.

(If you asked Joe though, he'd say his foundation is a walking breathing man, who wields a longsword with a wicked, tortured look upon his face.)

There was not a day that went by that Joe didn’t spend at least an hour up in the rafts with Nicky, his feet slung over the bars, dangling in the air with the sparks the steel-cutters made as they added on an arm, a joint, a chest plate to their Jaeger.

“She has no name,” Nicky says to him one day, curled over the handrail, his head laying over his crossed arms.

“You’ve made her a  _ she _ ,” Joe teases.

Nicky smirks into his arms, shoots Joe a  _ look  _ under the wavy riot of his hair. 

“She told me that Yusuf,” he says. “But she will need a real name too.”

“Ask Andy,” Joe suggests. “She’s seen more Jaegers come through here than anybody else. I’m sure she could give us some inspiration.”

Nicky snorts, but he doesn’t look amused. He rises from the railing, stiff as a board his eyes outwardly focused on the skeleton of their soon to be Jaeger.

“Andy talks too much for someone who has no meaningful things to say,” Nicky says.

“That’s a bit harsh Nicolo don’t you think?”

“No,” he says. “You do not know her well enough yet.”

Joe pulls himself up to stand by Nicky’s side. Their arms brushing. He reaches out to brush their fingers together. 

“Ah, but I know you don’t I?” he says.

Nicky jumps when they touch but he recovers, leans in, and rests his head on Joe’s shoulder.

“Yes, Yusuf,” Nicky says squeezing hard at Joe’s palm. “Of course.”

  
  


~

Nile is not to be a pilot. Not yet.

She isn’t drift compatible with anyone but Andy, and no one is going to break apart the two most experienced Jaeger pilots to put Andy in with a newbie.

It hurts Nile, she won’t say it out loud but at night when she knocks on Joe’s door with a bottle of cheap strawberry flavored vodka and a deck of damp cards, the look in her eyes is hunted. She has too much energy and no outlet for it. She spars. With Joe, with Andy, and even Nicky, on days he shows his face to anyone but Joe, but it’s strange for her. Being the understudy.

“Angel and Rosemarie have named their Jaeger, Cobra Green,” Nile says one night referring to the two Phillino sisters who had secured the other Jaeger pilot spot. Nile’s curled up on the corner of Joe’s bed painting her nails a glittery black. She’s not very good at it, and she keeps wiping the excess paint on her fingers off on a towel.

“That’s good,” Joe says. “You’ve seen them in the simulations, they’re very fast when they fight. Striking quickly.”

Nile hums. 

“You and Nicky are better.”

Joe laughs shakes his head. Though a part of him preened with the praise. “It’s only training. We could be very different in the field.” 

She raised a brow at him. “Do you really believe that?”

He said nothing because he would not admit she was right. It felt too early, to put what he’s been feeling into words.

There were many aspects to Jaeger training. There was physical training. The endless barrage of training in the sparring room. Sparring sticks, swords, fists, kicks. There were a dozen trainers there day in and day out to move them through boxing and judo. They ran through the drills of  Muay Thai and Krav Maga until they could no longer stand, crouched down on the floor with breakfast calling at the back of their throats. 

Sometimes they spent fourteen hours a day going through it all. More than once he and Nicky have stumbled out of the room clinging to each other for support only to crash on the nearest comfortable surface when they got back to their rooms.

But the Jaeger’s were not all about physicality.

The Drift loomed over Joe and Nicky, as it did all impending pilots, a shadow, or a blessing.

They were drift compatible, Joe knew it in his heart, but that did not mean their partnering was foolproof.

When they are not sparring or being poked and prodded at by the psychologists, the physicians, the neurologists, they spend much of their time in the simulation room, with the holograms.

It was the closest a Jaeger pair could get to the real thing, hooked in on a mock rig fighting holograms through a phased screen. 

Joe and Nicky had a flawless record. A kill for every drop.

When they fought in the simulation, Joe felt like he could walk through fire. All the pain and the aching of his bones, the grief that still lingered, washed away until he was impervious and untouchable. To his left, Nicky powered through the kaiju like a monster made man. They were ruthlessly efficient, just as they were when they sparred, bare and suitless in the dawn of the a.m. with their swords. 

When the screen flashed green with their triumph, the stats piled up high on the holograms, Nicky would look at him and Joe could not breathe with the happiness he saw. 

They’d walk out of the simulation, their arms slung around each other's shoulders, laughing into the crook of each other’s necks, whispering things no one else would ever hear or know.

So yes, Joe does think they will do well in the field.

He thinks with Nicky he can do anything and it’s been months since he was so sure of himself.

But he won’t say that yet, after all, it’s only been a month since they’ve met. And still, the Shatterdome has had to drop two Jaegers for a fight off the coast of Singapore. Only one returned.

This was more important than Joe and the burning ache in his chest where Nicky’s smile has carved out a cave to call home. 

There were more important things. 

From the way Nile watches him, eyes narrowed, Joe does not think even she believes him.

~

There’s a spot at the top of the Shatterdome where the air vents open up into the sky. They’re big hollowed out steel caverns high enough that you can see the entirety of the city’s skyline, creeping out from the island chain like stalagmites, black and sharpened to puncture. In the center of it all the bones of Reckoner, the kaiju who lead the 2016 attack on the city, almost glow in the space between buildings. 

Hong Kong has rebuilt itself around the skeleton of it and harbors hordes of kaiju worshippers and black market dealers who kneel before the cage of its whited-out ribs and pray. Though with the increasing frequency of the kaiju attacks Joe thinks that kaiju aren’t listening.

This place, the metal vents the size of houses, is where Nicky would spend most of his nights those first few elusive days Joe searched for him.

“I needed someplace quiet,” Nicky had told him when he first brought Joe up there to sit teetered on the edge of the vent’s opening with Hong Kong glittering diamond-like on the horizon. “It’s always so loud in here. Often I cannot think.”

“Was it quiet?” Joe had asked, hesitant around Nicky in a way he hadn’t been since they met. “In Genoa?”

Nicky had tensed. “No,” he’d said. “But it was different. Less clanging. More people-sounds. The ocean was kinder. The water here is dark.”

Joe has gotten little out of Nicky but that. 

He didn’t talk about his home. Not in the way Joe did. His mother and sister and uncle have all made appearances in the many late-night conversations Joe has with Nicky in their favorite spot. 

That’s not to say Nicky is cruel about it. He watches and listens, asks questions where they’re necessary, and curls up to Joe’s side, a warm comforting presence when the ache of it all builds up in Joe’s throat and spills out over his cheeks.

It hurts, and it will always hurt, but there is nothing Joe loves more than to have Nicky’s head on his shoulder, his fingers rubbing soft soothing circles onto the skin on the tops of Joe’s hands while he cries.

Joe doesn’t press. He knows the well of grief too well to go digging down for more out of it. And not everyone processes their pain the same way.

He doesn’t press. 

~

In the back of his mind he thinks, 

_ I don’t have to press. When we drift, I will know and Nicky will know and all the demons we hide away in locked boxes in our minds are unlocked to dance on our families’ graves, if only to mock us for a moment until we catch them, burning in the light of the Drift, made fuel for the Jaeger and the rage that comes after. _

_ The drift is unbiased. The drift is fair. _

The memories aren’t.

~

“Have you seen her up close yet?” Booker asks Joe chugging scotch from a flask in the elevator.

Joe rolls his eyes. “You know I haven’t.” Then more bashfully than he’d like to admit. “Nicky and I agreed a week ago we wouldn’t look until she was done.”

“You are too much.” Booker waves the flask around in his direction. “Nicky has you whipped.”

“I’m not whipped,” Joe says, fighting to keep a straight face at Booker’s bemused expression. “I am, I am accommodating.”

“Sure, call it that,” Booker mumbles and takes another swig.

Booker is a strange man. A week after Joe and Nicky became drift partners Joe found the man elbow deep in the macerated remains of a kaiju’s spine, his rubber gloves sizzling with the blood’s acidity. 

Before he’d even managed to get out a “what the hell, why would you do this, your arm is  _ burning _ ” Nicky walked in juggling a half-eaten apple in his hands and said, “Oh is that Phantom Book? Are you taking skin samples?”

“Spinal fluid, toss me the apple,” Booker had said, short, succinct, entirely too focused, and in Joe’s opinion entirely too fascinated by the neon dripping toxic mess that was kaiju flesh. 

Nicky tossed the fruit to him and Booker caught it without even looking up. It was another twenty minutes before he did, and only then did he introduce himself to Joe with an outstretched hand sticky with a myriad of glowing fluids.

It took Joe a while to understand him.

But Booker was actually quite simple, and about as wounded as they came.

He had PhDs in both genetics and biochemistry along with an MFA in Literature of all things. He was undeniably French. He waxed poetic on Dumas and drank an unhealthy amount of wine, cursing out referees on tv in maybe four different languages.

When he wasn’t watching football or gambling Nicky out of his money he was in the labs of the Shatterdome covered in entrails and scribbling down the chemical components of kaiju brains, slumped over the eyepiece of a microscope, asleep, at five in the morning studying the regeneration of kaiju skin cells, with a bottle in his hand.

(Joe learns that he drinks to forget. How Booker and his family were on vacation in Manila when a kaiju came in 2016, taking his wife and two of his sons. Leaving the third crippled and incapacitated by a crumbling block of concrete. How Booked carried him across the city for three days looking for help until the internal bleeding killed him and Booker rocked his son to sleep through it so that he'd go in comfort.

And the months after he’d spent in a drunken stupor until he’d gotten sober enough to worm his way into the black market of kaiju parts, harvesting flesh, not for poultices and potions but to  _ study  _ it. To stop the endless crumbling of cities, the destruction of homes and men who are driven to the bottom of a bottle, the bottom of a bridge.)

Nicky didn’t like sports, and Andy and Quynh weren’t really football people, so it was Joe who spent the occasional late night with the man, often flying in with him to Hong Kong to peruse the selections under Reckoner’s corpse. Catching a ride to wherever the last kaiju fell and watching Booker wade through the thick viscous water to get his hands on another clue, another solution.

Booker is dedicated, as they all should be.

Today it’s Booker who gives Joe a shove out of the elevator and onto the Shatterdome floor where everything is buzzing with frantic activity and anticipation of a drift test on a new Jaeger. 

Up ahead in slot number ten is the Jaeger Joe and Nicky made together.

Twilight Sword.

Gleaming purple and black and gold in the harsh light. Mark 4, electrically powered, she was made slender, to aid the fast range of mobility befitting Joe and Nicky’s fighting style that the neurologist thought would translate well into the drift. 

But Twilight is bulky about the shoulders, with a broad torso and double plated to support the long platinum swords folded up and stored in her forearms.

Jaeger’s have had swords before, but there was never one  _ built  _ for it.

Nicky, Andy, and Quynh are already waiting for them at the base of the Jaeger. Quynh has an arm slung around Nicky’s shoulders. Andy’s watching them an unnatural fondness for her usually stoniness.

When Nicky sees Joe he breaks away from them and reaches a hand out for Joe. Joe takes it without even thinking and then they’re connected, standing in the shadow of their fate, polished and perfect just ready for them to jump in and dirty her up a little bit.

“Are you ready?” Andy says to them, but she’s looking at Joe.

“More than anything else in my life.” He makes his voice firm.

“Okay, if you feel like you need to back out we can wait, it doesn’t have to be today—”

“Andy,” Nicky says, sharply. “We’re ready.”

Quynh twines her hand with Andy’s, a mirror to Joe and Nicky. 

“There’s no more waiting, love,” she says. She smiles but it looks weak, troubled. There are circles under her eyes. 

Quynh nods at Booker who’s been waiting patiently, a hand clenched on his flask. 

“Take us to Command Book, we have a test run to get to.”

~

In the older Jaegers, the power is in the heart.

A radioactive core, only a millimeter of an error away from disaster, and thus when the Jaegers were made the pilots were placed in the head.

It’s sensible from an aesthetic point of view. The drift is conducted in the mind, might as well put the pilots there too. 

When Joe and Nicky are strapped into their drivesuit, colored a sleek almost black colored indigo, and paraded into the head of Twilight Sword Joe has the briefest flash of doubt, staring out onto the screen of their Jaeger.

They can see the whole floor of the Shatterdome in a wash of flashing blue, red, green calculations. Distances, heart rates, body temperatures. It’s a wash of sensation. It feels like he’s teetering on the edge of the world.

He feels exposed. He can see the claws of a kaiju coming for him. He can hear people screaming. He sees his  _ mother  _ sucked beneath a tidal wave.

“Joe?”

Nicky’s eyes are soft with worry. They’re strapping him into the left side. He’s doing his best to seem unconcerned with the fumblings of the staff clicking him into place but he flinches, barely with each brush of their hands. 

He’s shaking.

Joe sucks in a breath, lets it out through his mouth.

“I’m here Nicolo,” he says. “We’re alright.”

Nicky nods. He looks unconvinced but he says no more.

A staff member puts on his helmet, then Nickys. The relay gel flows through their visors and with it comes the zap of impulse. 

“Preparing neural handshake,” Copley says through the intercom.

Joe closes his eyes.

~

“He’s going to chase the rabbit,” Andy told him a day ago, cornering him outside the bathroom.

“You have little faith Andromache,” Joe had sniped back at her. “If you’ve told him this then it only hurts his chances.”

“I haven’t told him anything.” Her arms had been crossed. “I don’t have to. He knows and he won’t tell you because he doesn’t want to disappoint you.”

“You don’t know what Nicky’s told me,” he’d hissed at her. It stung. Joe knew how much of Nicky Andy had for herself. And it pained him when with each passing day, Nicky spun himself into the center of Joe’s world.

“I know what he’s hidden.” She’d turned to go, eyes flashing. “He’s stubborn. He stews in his hatred, his pain because he thinks he deserves it. Try to lead him out of it.”

She’d walked away, and Joe was with more questions than he had answers, and no one willing to answer them.

~

The drift comes with answers, unwanted and without consent, a sacrifice in its blue bloody palms.

~

_ Mother, sister, uncle, the salty air of Tunis, the white-tan lines of Carthage’s columns, the taste of baklava nutty and sweet, a house on a hill with his mother’s favorite flowering vines, the warmth of the sun in summer, holding his sister on his shoulder while she giggles into his curls, panting in the sand of the sparring pit, his uncle a tall shadow with a sword, Nile cursing, slamming down a deck of cards, Nicolo in the low-light of the rafters barely smiling, godly and gorgeous, a distant monstrous roar, a kaiju on the head screen, water and waterwaterwaterwater _

He pulls himself out.

It almost tears him apart to do so, to leave the drift and the drug it offers. Blinking away the memories, he hears Copley say through the waking fog of the neural handshake  _ Joe’s locked in, but Nicky’s chasing, I can’t get him, Joe you need to— _

He has one second to take a look at Nicky in the real world, green eyes wide and fearful, so fearful before Joe’s sucked into a memory, not of his own. 

He wakes up in his Drivesuit, covered head to toe in soot, a smoking shattered Genoa spread out before him.

~

Nicky drags himself up into the northern hills of Genoa, his ankle twisted at an awkward angle. He’s in a priest’s robes, but they’re ruined, covered in black city grime. Phantom roars in the background, tauntingly, the city is destroyed, all it does is smash for the fun of it now.

Joe watches Nicky stumble over to the remains of a house. The crumbled yellow stucco and glass a glittering deathtrap wisped about the cobble street.

Crouched in the ruin of the house a man sifts through the dust, plucks out a tattered photo frame. 

It’s a portrait. The man stands tall and straight behind a chair in the photo, his hand resting on the back of a wooden chair. In the chair, there’s a woman with a heart-shaped face and pretty green eyes. Nicky’s eyes. In her lap is a baby, chubby-cheeked. To her left there are two young girls, twins, smiling with missing front teeth. 

Behind them, arm and arm with his father is a young Nicolo. 

The real one walks through what was once a doorway and stands, bleeding, before his father.

Nicky’s father looks up, startled.

“ _ Nicolo _ ,” he says. Rushes to stand and moves to step towards his son but stops.

“Where? You’re alone?” he asks in Italian, which Joe somehow understands.

Nicky’s face is black with soot but there are flashes of his skin in the tear tracks coming down his face. He blinks and more tears trail down.

“I couldn’t—I tried,” Nicky croaks. “The parish was crushed under its foot. I tried to get them but they’re. Father, they’re  _ dead. _ ”

He’s crying and babbling, he hobbles through the rubble trying to reach his father but he trips and falls. His father is standing as he was before. He does not move to pick up his son.

“ _ You left them, Nicolo _ ,” he moans into his hands. “You left your mother, your sisters, your brother, to be picked apart by crows. Only you are left?”

He asks but he already knows. Nicky knows. Nicky would not have come back alone unless that’s what he was. Alone. He came back for his father who takes a step back when Nicky reaches out to grab for his foot.

“Father please,” Nicky begs through his sobbing.

He spits where Nicky reaches out. A glob of it lands, glistening on Nicky’s bloodied hands where he’d gone digging for corpses under the church he’d preached and taught and loved at.

Nicky stares shocked, and his father walks around him like Nicky is nothing but a piece of furniture and into the street where the survivors were beginning to mingle about. A couple of them try to stop him, pointing at Nicky laid out and broken in the house. He ignores them and walks into the rising dusty storm of the city.

On the horizon, a Jaeger is dropped into the sea.

  
  


~

“Shut it down! Shut it down right now!”

Andy’s screaming, there’s chaos in the Command Room, and Joe’s trying to keep Nicky from blowing up the goddamn Shatterdome with how much he’s moving. 

“Nicky! Nicky, please! Nicky listen to me, my heart. It’s over, it’s all over. I’m here, listen to me. No one will ever leave you again. I will not leave you,  _ listen to me.” _

Nicky has a hand raised still, to reach for his father, when there’s a mighty thrum of electricity and the power flickers in Twilight Sword, in the Shatterdome. Everything goes dark, and Joe detaches himself from the rig, dives for Nicky who collapses, eyes glazed, in his arms.

“Nicky,” Joe breathes, pulling his helmet off with frantic hands. He cups Nicky’s cheeks and tips up his head so that they’re brushing noses. 

“Nicolo, it’s me.”

The door hisses and Andy runs in, Quynh at her heels her face green. Booker and Nile are behind them.

Joe puts up a hand to stop them. For one Andy listens.

“Yusuf?” Nicky’s voice is slurred, but he leans into all points of contact between them like he’s starved for it.

“It’s me  _ habibi _ ,” Joe says and he thinks he’s crying. His throat is tight with tears and heartache. He wants to take Nicky and  _ leave.  _ He wants to whisk him away from the world where nothing can ever touch them. But that’s not his right.

Nicky sighs, mumbles something and Andy steps forward a med team rushing in at a wave of her hand.

Joe has to let go, and the doctors put Nicky on a stretcher, no doubt to go immediately poke and prod at his brian. There would be another drift eval for them. There would be probing and prodding. Joe could not move for the fear of it and everything they could lose. 

Andy leaves with them and Nile follows. Booker lingers at the doorway, looks around at the scene with sad watery eyes, takes a sip from one of his many flasks, and walks out his shoulders hunched and tight.

“I’m sorry,” Quynh says. It’s barely more than a whisper. It sounds like she’s consoling them as if they’ve already lost.

Joe can’t stand to look at her. If he sees Andy he thinks he might hit her. But it doesn’t matter. He storms out of the head of Twilight to medbay, to Nicky, and pretends he is not crying. 

~

Nicky sleeps for twelve hours. Joe is by his side for eleven hours and fifty minutes of it. 

Andy is there in the beginning, a looming presence in the room. She’s there with the med team before Joe arrives and bless her, the moment Joe walks in, she goes out.

When they pass each other she puts a hand on his shoulder, and to Joe’s amazement, he doesn’t grab it, break it, fall to his knees under it. He keeps his eyes on Nicky and ignores her to sit by his bedside.

There are ten billion different wires attached to his head, feeding into the scanning machines the neurologists hover over with nervous excitement. They leave soon too, after the first hour, leaving Joe and Nicky alone with the rhythmic beeping of the machines, the heart monitor.

Quynh comes in once and looks Nicky over, running a hand through the fringe of his hair, smoothing it back like one does to a child. Then she does it to Joe too, a gentle touch.

Joe cries then, for a good five minutes he just lets himself go, Quynh’s arm wrapped around his shoulder, her cheek pressed to his temple humming soothing raspy sounds.

She leaves after acquiring some cough drops from the nurse promising to send in Nile and Booker later.

Joe feels the exhaustion of the day weighing over him but he fights sleep. His head aches, there’s a phantom pain at the bottom of his skull where the Drift should be. He only had it for a  _ second,  _ and it was not enough. He squeezes Nicky’s hand.

This will not be the end.

Nile comes in at around eight in the morning with Booker, carrying what looks like half of the mess’ halls breakfast. Joe thanks her with a tired smile and accepts a cup of coffee from Booker, a finger of whiskey slipped in.

Nile tells him to shower. He’s still in the sweat-soaked underclothes they all wear beneath the drivesuits. It takes some shoving, and some longing glances back at Nicky’s bedside but he goes. It’s the quickest shower he ever has.

When he gets back to medbay the bed is rumpled, empty, and Nicky is gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come check me out on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/1derspark)! I'm taking prompts at the moment so if you have a TOG idea drop me an ask, or just come and say hi :)
> 
> As always comments and kudos are appreciated and feed the beast!


	3. But when you're in a Jaeger,

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Joe, he’s _done_. He can’t hold anything back anymore. For weeks he’s existed in half gestures, afraid that one slight intentful touch would set Nicky on fire, and chase him away with smoke. Joe has desired this man the day he met him, and on the second he loved him, and on the third decided that he would follow him to the four corners of the Earth without question, without pause, even if Nicky did not love him back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi everyone! Sorry this chapter is a little later than usual, I moved into my college dorm and I'm still kind of getting into a work/writing rhythm so the next update might not be as quick as the last two have been. But we're almost done!
> 
> Also, there's a brief moment down here where there are some suicidal thoughts from Nicky if you don't want to read that just skip past the paragraph that starts with "As he walked"
> 
> A big thanks to Kellin for beta-reading this for me, you are the best <3
> 
> Enjoy!

It turns out that Nicky’s hiding spot isn’t a really good place to hide.

Joe goes there first. He’s come to know Nicolo better than anyone here, he’s the one who’s sat with the man at night spilling secrets while the twinkling cloud of Hong Kong lived and breathed for them across the bay.

Joe _knows_ that's where Nicky is.

Apparently Andy does too. 

He climbs up to the vents and comes across them arguing. It’s not bad, at least not yet, they speak in low hushed tones. One of Nicky’s hands goes to his temple every so often and presses like it still aches.

“Why don’t you listen to me?” Andy says. “I’m not trying to stifle your dreams Nicky, I’m being realistic. I knew you couldn’t handle the drift but you went on and did it anyway!”

“Do not lecture me on what I already know, Andromache,” Nicky says voice low and tinged with exhaustion. “I was there.”

“You were there but you didn’t _see it._ ” Andy tucks her head down, pinches the bridge of her nose. 

“Nicky, you would have killed us. The whole dome, gone. You, gone. Joe, gone. Is that what you want?”

“ _Never!”_ Nicky turns so fast, Joe barely registers it. He’s in Andy’s face now, so much like the first night, Joe saw him. 

Joe has learned that Nicky is a man restrained. He keeps all his emotions tethered and simmering underneath his skin. Joe thinks that many people assume Nicky is shy, he keeps his smiles for the few people he trusts. He's quiet, contemplative in conversations, and only adds in his opinion when it has weight. 

But whenever Nicky speaks it is with conviction. And when Nicky is pushed, he comes out with claws.

“You have no idea what I would do for him,” Nicky says. His voice is very low, very flat, whispered and Joe almost doesn’t hear him. 

“I think I do,” Andy says slowly. She’s keeping her breathing steady but keeps Nicky’s gaze. Not backing down, but not provoking him any further. 

“You love him,” she says simply like it’s plainly obvious fact, maybe it _is,_ and Joe’s throat goes tight. “You love him but didn’t tell him about Genoa. About me. How we found you, Nicky, when you drift with someone there’s no _hiding._ I wouldn’t want you to hide it anyway, but for some reason you do.”

Andy’s eyes flicker over to the side. She’s spotted him. Nicky follows her eyes and he untenses but it’s not with relief, he looks panicked, twitchy like he’s on the verge of running.

There’s nowhere to go to. 

“Tell him,” Andy says, already making her way out. “Then we’ll sort this mess out.” She stops by Joe and gives him what is both somehow an approving and a warning look. 

“But you will not be going into a Jaeger again,” she says to them both, her boots clicking on the floor as she leaves.

Nicky is trembling, from rage or fear, Joe can’t really tell, he suspects it’s a roiling storm of both. 

Joe can’t stand it.

“Nicky,” he starts and rushes forward to take the man in his arms, to kiss him, to fall to his knees and _beg,_ but Nicky steps back, his arms crossed, jaw clenched.

“Yusuf please,” he breathes, his face desperate. “Wait. Let me apologize, I shouldn’t have let you in there with me. I should have told you how I am—”

“Told me what, Nicolo?” Joe says. There’s a bite to it that he can’t keep out of his mouth. “That you are scarred and broken and not worthy of kindness? That you are not worthy of being my pilot?”

He shakes his head, laughs, dry and hollow. “You insult me, Nicky, to think that I would ever believe such horrible things about you. Your trauma is not repulsive to me.”

Joe takes a cautious step forward, watching for any minute movement in Nicky’s body. When Joe reaches him he holds out his hands' palms up until, slowly, tentatively, Nicky slides his own over them. Joe squeezes his hands tight, a bridge between them both.

“Would you say those things about me?” Joe asks. “That I am broken? You have seen me Nicolo, all of me, the nights where the sight of the sea makes me sick. The days where we fight until we drop. I scream in the night too. Does that merit a warning?”

“No,” Nicky whispers, his eyes following the lines of Joe’s fingers, every furrow, and wrinkle there, the occasional white starburst of a scar. They are both wounded. They are both not without terror.

“Then you are not broken,” Joe says. 

Nicky swallows and with every part of his body fights back tears. His eyes shine in the light. “We may never drift again.” He says it like a brand. As if he’s given them both a black spot, and the drift is all that was worth their time.

“I don’t care,” Joe says. He raises his chin up. “The drift is nothing to me. Not when I have you.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Do not tell me what I do and do not mean Nicolo!” Joe hisses, grabbing Nicky’s chin with a hard swipe of his hand and bringing his face in close until they are touching everywhere but the panting heat of their mouths. 

Joe, he’s _done._ He can’t hold anything back anymore. For weeks he’s existed in half gestures, afraid that one slight intentful touch would set Nicky on fire, and chase him away with smoke. Joe has desired this man the day he met him, and on the second he loved him, and on the third decided that he would follow him to the four corners of the Earth without question, without pause, even if Nicky did not love him back.

He tips Nicky’s chin up so their noses brush and when Nicky inhales it's a shaky, needy thing, his eyelashes fluttering long and dark against his skin. 

“If I were to tell you of all the things you mean to me,” Joe whispers into his mouth. “I would never have a day’s rest. The list never ends, Nicolo.”

Joe kisses him.

He starts the kiss soft with room for Nicky to pull away, for all of Joe’s poetic blustering he is still afraid, but it takes only a second for Nicky to lean into it. He whispers a reverent _“Yusuf”_ into the space between them and stretches a hand up to Joe’s nape, where he winds his fingers through the thick curls there and tugs Joe closer.

Joe pushes Nicky back until they hit the cold metal of the vented walls and kisses him into it, puts all his pain and love and wonder into a swipe of his tongue, a nip at Nicky’s cupid’s bow, muttering sweet nothings with every breath of air until he has to tear away and worship another part of Nicky some more.

“Joe,” Nicky sighs with his head thrown back while Joe laves a wet kiss over a fresh love bite on Nicky’s collarbone. “By God, you are too much.”

Joe nuzzles at the soft skin of his throat, works his way up Nicky’s face with butterfly kisses until they are eye to eye once again. Then he grins wide, smooth as honey.

“Overwhelmed my love?” 

“Yes.” Nicky brushes his knuckles against Joe’s cheek. “But I would not change it.”

Joe breathes him in, presses his nose into the sweetness of Nicky’s face, he smells like hospital and sweat and sea salt. He smells like a man gone wild with something sharp, and cutting. Love is not all tenderness, it’s jumping off a cliff into the dark, hoping there’s water there to catch you, and even then the droplets bite at you anyway. 

“I will have you as you are Nicolo di Genova,” Joe says, taking the plunge. “I am an all or nothing kind of man.”

Nicky hums, thumbs at Joe’s cheek. He’s quiet because he has something to say, but does not know how to express it. Joe knows, Joe waits.

“I am afraid,” he says with some effort. “But you make it bearable, facing all the things that keep me up at night.”

“We are Jaeger pilots Nicky,” Joe starts, firm and without question. They are, he’s felt it, anyone who says anything different is ignorant or too blind to see. 

“We fight them together, or we die trying.”

~

Andy, it seems, has left the Shatterdome to deal with what she has deemed their “clusterfuck”.

Quynh tells them, catching the eye of a determined and striding Joe who practically dragged Nicky to the Command Room to give Andy a piece of their minds.

“She’s not here,” Quynh says. “She’s in Italy, speaking to the benefactors.” The look she gives Nicky is stern but not unkind. “They’ve expressed their concerns for the project.”

“As they should,” Nicky says, his head hanging just a bit lower.

“No, they should _not,”_ Joe jumps in. “Nicky and I have spoken about the Drift. We will be prepared next time.”

“Joe, there very well may not be a next time,” Quynh says. She shuffles them away from the Command Room and its eavesdropping ears. They walk until they reach the rafters, and the Jaegers hum and hiss below them.

Quynh leans heavily against the railing, squeezing her eyes shut like she’s blinking away a headache. Joe supposes that's what they are. 

“I will do my best with Andromache,” she says when she raises herself up. “She could calm the Italians should she wish, but right now that is not what she’ll be doing.”

“She would rather sabotage us than let us try piloting again?” Yusuf spits out. His hand is still clasped with Nicky’s.

Quynh’s eyes flash. “She’s not _sabotaging_ anything. She’s cleaning up your mess. Nicky, you knew you weren’t ready.” She points at Nicky, each of her words punctuated, biting. They’ve made her angry, which is not something that’s easy to do. 

She finishes with, “And Joe you were too busy making fucking puppy eyes at him to realize it.” Her chest is heaving like that took some effort out of her. Reprimanding some green, lovestruck pilots. 

She sighs. “I want you both to be piloting. Believe me, I do, and with the way things are going, I think you will be sooner rather than later. But it’s not me you have to convince.”

“How can we?” Nicky says softly. 

Quynh looks away, stares down into the spark-bright clamor of the Jaegers. She blinks, slowly, then says, “I’ll help you. I have an ace in the hole.”

~

Andy spends another day in Italy before Quynh gives her a call. Joe and Nicky watch her from the doorway of the women’s shared dorm, Nicky plastered to Joe’s back, his head hooked over his shoulder and trembling into Joe’s neck.

When Quynh hangs up she puts the phone down on the table with a resounding thud. She looks up at them and, grimly, nods.

“She’ll hear you out.”

Nicky’s head falls into the smooth center of Joe’s torso, just under his shoulder blades. Joe squeezes his forearm and does not bring up the dampness gathering on his shirt.

~

Andy walks with them in Hong Kong. 

It’s a strange and wonderful city, and it looks wildly different on the ground level than from their viewpoint up in the vents. It’s a wash of fluorescent lights and shiny glass storefronts tangled in with red and black pagodas, rolling green hills, the scent of sesame oil at a cooking stall. There are buildings higher than Jaegers filled with thousands of apartments and thousands more people crammed into homes the size of parking spaces. They have polo and tea houses with English finger foods, cucumber sandwiches, and soft powdered breakfast scones, colonialism hangs over the city but it’s less like a plague and more like a strained merging. 

Andy takes them through it until they reach Reckoner’s skeleton. It looks more imposing in the daytime, without the neon wash of lights that make it something intriguing. In the daytime, it’s bare for what it is. The sunlight casts every crack of bone and sinew into reality, and it becomes less of a tourist attraction, more of a memorial.

There are worshipers scattered here and there about the base of it, lighting candles and incense for the kaiju or for its victims. One wide stretch of rib is covered in pictures of the people it killed and a few people have gathered around it in the morning light, staring at the photos with wide glazed eyes.

The black market dealers haven’t set up yet, their shops hang out with the shutters closed and locked three times over, the guarded muscle from the overnight watch loom around the doorways looking a little ruffled from lack of sleep but no less intimidating.

There are many people who would do anything to get their hands on a kaiju part.

Andy goes up to one, a very tall Chinese man with a piercing above his eyebrow in a black suit and barks out something to him in rapid-fire Cantonese. They speak for a moment longer before he turns around and unlocks the shop disappearing inside before reappearing with a large paper bag wrapped and tied with string.

Andy thanks him and they move on.

“Is that for Booker?” Nicky asks while they walk.

“Yes,” she says. “He asked me to pick it up for him this morning. A piece of a kaiju toenail I think.”

They’ve reached the sealine, out on the horizon they can see the Shatterdome.

“Did you walk us out here just to pick up Booker’s toenail?” Joe asks.

“You know it was Immortal Guard who took out Reckoner, yes?” Andy says in a non-answer. 

“I did not,” Joe says hesitantly. Nicky shakes his head when Andy looks at him. She doesn’t sigh or chide them for it, she looks down at the water instead.

“I did. In early 2016, Quynh wasn’t always a pilot you know. She has a degree in neuroscience, she spent much of the early war days with the scientists behind the screens, watching neural interfaces.”

Andy smiles, stuck on a memory. “She loved it, she was very good. But she wanted to drive too.”

“I drove with a man named Lykon before her,” she says. “Whatever is left of his body is somewhere out in this bay.”

“Andy,” Nicky says. He’s gone to her side, his hand hovers over her shoulder, unsure of his welcome. “You never told me this.”

“Not many people know.” She plucks at one of the many bracelets on her wrist. She can’t look Nicky in the eye. “Lykon was a happy man. The most joyful person I’d ever met. We went through the academy together, well back then it wasn’t even a real academy, more of a rush training job. They were so desperate to take the kaiju down, the process wasn’t as thorough.” 

Andy finally meets Nicky’s eyes. “That’s why we are so insistent on your training.”

“I know,” Nicky says, he looks stricken. His face pale. Joe’s gut is in knots, the air between them all is loaded with grief and apologies and things still left unsaid. Joe comes over to Andy’s other side. Puts his hand over hers.

“We know,” he says.

“No you don’t,” Andy says. “You both were lucky enough to screw up in the dome where there were people there to stop you, to help. Lykon, we’d tested perfectly in the simulations together. When we booted up in the dome in a real Jaeger it went fine, but the drift didn’t flow so freely between us. There was much we wanted to hide from one another, our pasts. But we shared enough that the drift could flow, if only through a chokehold.”

“Out here, when you fight, there’s no room to hide anything.” Andy gestures about at the sea, the sky, the tip of Reckoner’s ribs on the skyline. “You’re repressing your strength when you tamp down on your memories. You need to be of one mind, and you can’t when you’re hiding something.”

“We got Reckoner down, but Lykon… he was sucked in again. And we shot down a skyscraper. It landed on us and we went into the sea. I managed to unhook myself from the rig, but when I tried to get him out he wouldn’t move with me.”

“He wasn’t dead so much as his mind was lost. And so I left him down there, to drown,” Andy says, there’s little inflection in her voice.

“Andy,” Joe starts. His head’s buzzing. He can feel the rushing water, he can see Nicolo down at the bottom of a trench, a seabed, his body picked apart by scavengers, still strapped into the remains of a rig. “You blame yourself, but what else could you have done?”

“I could have spoken to him about it,” she snaps. “This is why I’m telling you. Nicky, you hid your grief, your pain and it almost blew up the biggest Shatterdome in the world, with the best Jaegers, the best pilots that we _cannot_ afford to lose. And Joe you _let him.”_

“Is that my job Andromache? To poke around Nicky’s head until every insecurity is bared? Are we not allowed to have our minds to ourselves?” Joe counters.

“No you are not,” she says with finality. “That is a privilege you gave up when you came here.”

“I would share my mind with him,” Nicky jumps in. Joe whips his head around to look at him. Nicky’s brow is furrowed in thought, but his face is full of conviction. “I would share my life with him, anything. I am not giving up the privacy of my mind, I am extending it to the other half of me.”

“Nicky,” Joe breathes. That buzzing in his mind calms to a liquid joyous sense of satisfaction. He can feel a buildup of tears behind his eyes. But he dare not move with Andy between them, her approval still very much needed.

Andy steps back from them both, studies their figures, the way in which they stand a mirror to one another, their coats whipping in the breeze off the water. Even a foot apart they look connected, a string strung between their bodies. A tether.

“Make sure you do so,” she says, turning to walk back. Over her shoulder, she smirks, wry and tired but for now, satisfied. “You are last on the lineup, you will not pilot Twilight until every other Jaeger is already deployed. Though for the world’s sake I hope that day never comes.”

~

That night Nicky lays with him in bed, back to Joe’s chest.

They’re in a pair of soft sleep pants, though they’re shirtless. Joe listens while he speaks to his grief out loud. 

Nicky tells him the story of how he eventually made his way out from the rubble of his house to the street of scandalized and tearful neighbors. When he asked them where his father went they pointed only to the rising dust cloud that had blanketed the city. Too many miles, too many wreckages to piece through. Nicky went anyway. He searched and searched and searched but found nothing of the man he called father. 

As he walked, the sooty sharded remains of the city cutting a bloody pattern into the soles of his feet, he prayed. But it was not benevolent. For the first time in his life he did not thank God, he cursed him and begged him in equal measure, and when night fell and there was nothing for Nicky to track he headed back to his parrish by the sea, sat on the edge of the dock and contemplated jumping in and falling down and not swimming back up.

The tips of his toes skimmed the water when the bay trembled. He looked up, expecting God or Phantom or some kind of demon to come and take him for the punishment he deserved, but instead craned his eyes skywards to the glowing figure of a Jaeger.

The top of its head hissed and out came two pilots in sleek, black armor. 

They remove their helmets and Nicky thought them to be angels. Beautiful and wicked, for angels can be both in equal measure, the one with long black hair waves at Nicky from above. The woman whose hair is cropped travels down the long extended arm of her Jaeger until she is a reasonable distance from the water. 

Then she dives, the water swallows her up, and emerges, swimming her way to shore.

When Nicky jumps in, he does not fall, but powers on to meet her.

~

There’s something on his face. 

Joe groans, bats sluggishly at the gentle disturbance, and turns back into the warmth of his pillow, trying to fall back asleep.

There’s a laugh, barely more than a puff of air, and Joe is wide awake.

Nicky sits up in bed, the sheets curled carefully around him, hiding his bottom half. Joe knows he’s wearing his pajamas below, but a part of him dreams of bare skin, strong lean thighs, a treasure trail of soft brown hair that leads to a hard flushed cock. 

Nicky’s hair is a wild tangle, though Joe is sure his own is worse. There’s a long red sleep mark on his arm, and a slowly but surely fading hickey on his neck from where Joe had sucked on that lovely span of skin, not a few days before.

Joe has never seen anything more beautiful.

“Hello my love,” Joe rumbles, his voice in that deep-sleep gruffiness.

Nicky reaches down and plucks at a stringy black curl with his fingers, smiles as it bounces. He leans down and speaks into Joe’s lips.

“Hello, Yusuf.”

Their kiss is long and deep, Joe pulls Nicky in until they’re flush, cradling Nicky close, his arms wrapped tight around his ribs, stretching out his palms to touch as much skin as possible.

“Are you alright?” Joe says smoothing his hands up and down Nicky’s back. Nicky lays with his head pillowed on Joe’s chest, his chin resting over his hands.

“I am,” Nicky says. He pushes his face down into Joe’s chest, nuzzles at the skin like a cat with his cheek. “I have never spoken those things out loud before. Not even to Andy, or Quynh.”

“I am grateful you trust me enough to hear it.”

“I trust you,” Nicky says. “I trust you and I love you, Yusuf. I am no poet, no artist, not like you, so I will say it simply. I love you. I would share my life with no other, I would pilot with no one else.”

“You,” Joe says, bringing Nicky’s face down to kiss. His cheek, his brow, his eyelids. Every drop of his lips is a devotion he cannot yet articulate. He may be a poet, but he is also a man, and if he speaks he may cry, dissolve into tears and he wants to _show_ Nicky how he feels first.

Joe runs his hands down the softness of Nicky’s back until he reaches his ass and pulls him in close so that their groins brush, and then they are both breathless, unable to hold back their pleasurable gasps. 

“You Nicolo, are the light of my eyes, the wonder of my life. I love you, and it is not enough,” Joe says. Nicky whines at it, tugs on the back of Joe’s head to bring him closer. They kiss with a fury, Nicky sucks on his tongue and moans like he’s dying.

“We’ll make it enough,” Nicky says, pushing down the waistband of Joe’s thin pants. 

Joe reaches to do the same, and soon they are bare, heat swarming in Joe’s cock, heavy in Nicky’s hand. They’re too keyed up to do more than rock against the hard planes of each other's stomach, but that’s okay they have _time._

Joe would spend the rest of his life lost in Nicky, his body, his mind, the cadence of his footsteps, and the bell-like tingle of his laughter in the twilight of the sky.

Today he keeps up a steady tugging of Nicky’s cock, grabs his ass, and pulls him in close, so he can feel the trickle of pre-come Nicky’s cock leaves on his abdomen. 

When Nicky’s close he begs, in Italian, in English, in the halting bits of Arabic Joe has begun to teach him, _please and please, more and more,_ he comes with a kind of prayer into Joe’s mouth, his cock spurting warm and sticky and wonderful between them.

Joe slicks his hand with it and gets himself to the edge with Nicky’s spend. It takes only a few strokes until he’s gasping, black spots bursting behind his eyelids while Nicky leans over him, cooing into his ear.

They rest in the afterglow, sated, satisfied, a haze about the air of the cabin reminiscent of the drift. They breathe in tandem, like they are one soul split between flesh.

In an hour they will dress, and Andy will size them up, Quynh will look on, ever the watchman, and they will be put through the wringer, for a Jaeger sized carrot on the end of a stick.

Now, Joe pets down the side of Nicky’s ribs. He breathes, he thanks, he dreams.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come hang with me on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/1derspark)! I'm taking prompts right now, so if you have something for me drop me an ask. Or just come and say hi :)
> 
> As always comments and kudos are appreciated and feed the beast!


	4. suddenly, you can fight the hurricane.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What Joe remembers before he and Nicky are strapped into Twilight is the absolute rage-induced scream Booker lets out at the sight of not one, but two kaiju. Copley’s face drained, collapsing down into the chair, a hand over his mouth. How Nile pushes them both to the hangar bay, hollering at the top of her lungs for the mechanics, the gate-keepers, the maintenance workers to _move their asses we’re dropping Twilight down right now._
> 
> He remembers the drift settling in between him and Nicky and how unlike the first time it is not a calming blue balm to the soul, but it’s red and bloody and violent. And his hand twitches with the ache for a sword. 
> 
> Good thing he’s in one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Everyone: omg the end is coming soon yay!
> 
> Me: About that...
> 
> IM SORRY, more and more of this story keeps pouring out of me but I swear the next chapter, I am 90 percent sure, is the end. 90 percent. Let's bank on that.
> 
> Anyway, this one is a doozy, brace yourselves.
> 
> Big thanks to kellin who looked this chapter over for me again, much love to you darling <3
> 
> Enjoy!

The Maldives have been smashed to a million pieces of wreckage by another Kaiju who jumps oceans.

It is not Phantom, but his cousin maybe, Booker watches the fight and scribbles down furious calculations on his touchpad, his face pinched in frustration every time he looks up at the screen. 

Joe doesn’t feel much better.

He and Nicky have sequestered themselves in the Command Room with the rest of the techies, the department heads, the neurologists, all keeping an eye on Immortal Guard and the Australians’ Mark 4 Jaeger, Jupiter Storm. 

On screen the kaiju erupts out of the black water of the Indian Ocean onto the back of Immortal Guard, the blaring canal-bright metropolis of Sri Lanka’s Colombo, backing it all in a yellow-green glow. 

The sea has already risen there and flooded the downtown. 

And Joe’s just _watching._

The kaiju moves faster than even Phantom did, this sea jumper, making a mad dash for the Sri Lankan capital in mere minutes after it had decimated the Maldivian islands, with two Jaegers storming through the surf hard on its behind. 

It has six limbs, two of which hang higher on the meat of its shoulder, with giant muscled forearms and claws that propel it across the seafloor, grabbing up great swathes of rock and ocean silt as an anchor, and throwing the debris backwards at its hunters.

There is a great hiss over the sound systems and Joe watches Immortal shove the beast back with an elbow rocket, sending it far and sprawling where Jupiter waits for it with razor-edged fingers. 

Jupiter grabs it in a rush of tearing flesh and echoed screaming from the kaiju across the harbor. It manages to tug out one of its four forearms from the grip of the Jaeger and swings to bash Jupiter’s side in when Immortal comes in, Andy and Quynh screaming obscenities through the monitor, it’s right hand morphed into the signature sleek labrys that tore kaiju to pieces.

They hack off its stray arm, then at its face, while Jupiter holds the thing steady, bloody, spraying, and coating the Jaeger a neon blue. 

It’s a triumphant win, there was no city trampled under a kaiju’s feet (though the water damage is another story) and it feels good if only for a moment to watch the Jaegers escape mostly unscathed back to base, while the helicopters hone in on the matter of the corpse.

There’s a mad dash to the Jaeger floor, Joe and Nicky at the front of it, running parallel to the Jaeger’s being dropped in through the gaping roof doors. 

Jupiter Storm comes in first and the handsome brothers who pilot it come out whooping, slapping backs but always within an arm's reach of each other, still high on the closeness of the drift and not yet willing to be parted.

Joe and Nicky head for Immortal and wait with a jittery Nile, a breathless Booker, and a rather nervous looking Copley for the doors to swing open, and Andy and Quynh to parade themselves out beautiful and triumphant on a good kill.

It doesn’t happen. A few of the milling, twitchy interns who follow Copley around like puppies throw questions at him. 

_Are the doors stuck? Vital signs are okay if somewhat accelerated. Should we call the technicians? What is happening? Copley?_

“Everyone out!” he barks. It’s jarring, a damper on the contented energy of the Shatterdome’s success. But they obey, most of them. Booker raises a brow. And Nile crosses her arms. Nicky moves closer to Joe, they tangle their fingers together without even thinking.

“Fine,” Copley says at their united front. “She would have wanted you to know anyway.”

Her picks at the override lock until the door hisses and with a plume of mist and exhaust. They stride into the cloud of it, unable but determined to see.

Quynh is on the floor, cradled in Andy’s lap and at first, Joe thinks she’s dead. 

Nicky must too, he gasps, a raw and wet sound he can’t hold in, and rushes to her side. 

Joe is surprised Andy lets him, but they have more pressing problems. Blood pours out of Quynh’s nostrils, her mouth and chin are slick with the shiny red-blackness of it, fresh. There’s some drying foam at the corners of her mouth and when Joe spots the small piece of haggard metal in Andy’s hand wet with spit he realizes Quynh’s had a seizure.

Quynh’s eyes flutter when Nicky brushes his fingers over her face, down to her neck for a pulse. She doesn’t wake, but groans and curls into the hard edges of Andy’s armored stomach.

“What the fuck,” Booker says rather bluntly. 

Copley’s speaking to someone into his earpiece, but he drops quickly to Quynh’s side.

“What is wrong with her?” Nicky asks, his voice is carefully level, but Joe can hear the slight tremble in it.

It’s Andy who answers. And it’s not exactly helpful.

“She had a seizure, she's fine.”

“Fine?” Booker squawks, he gesticulates wildly at Quynh’s unconscious form. “She fucking seized with you in the Jaeger and you think that’s fine?”

“It’s happened before,” Copley mutters, running what looks like some kind of thermometer over Quynh’s forehead.

“What?” Nile jumps in. “You can’t be serious.”

“I am.” Copley doesn’t even spare Andy a glance, though Joe surmises that she’s imagining his embowelment in many detailed and varied ways by the way she's looking at him. “We don’t have time for this. Help me lift her.”

Nicky steadies himself by Quynh’s neck, holding her up with gentle hands while Copley and Andy take her torso. Joe rushes to her legs. 

The drivesuit adds a good fifty pounds of weight to a pilot’s form, it wasn’t easy to carry Quynh even with her smaller form. 

Booker and Nile stepped into the hallway to give them room to move, shooting furtive glances around the corner in case of any wandering eyes.

But the hallways were uncharacteristically empty, not a footfall, not a chattering intern, not a sound or sight to be had. 

“Stop worrying,” Andy snaps at them. “No one’s coming but the medical team. Copley locked it down.”

“You seem very sure of that,” Nile comments dryly.

There’s a commotion, and like magic one of the medteams barrels down the hallways. Not one of them is surprised to see Quynh sprawled in their arms, her face a mess of blood and bile.

“Like I said,” Copley sighs, positioning Quynh comfortably into the stretcher and the medteam immediately step in to attach and probe and scan Quynh’s body. 

“This has happened before.”

~

“She’s killing her,” Nicky says to Joe in a haunted whispered plea by Quynh’s bedside.

“Nicky, please, I’m sure that’s not true.”

Nile is asleep in one of the plastic hospital beds in the corner but otherwise, they’re alone. Andy left not too long after they’d gotten Quynh settled, along with a scowling, rather furious Copley. She’d kissed her partner’s forehead and without even a glimpse at anyone else in the room stormed out with Copley at her heels, already on the beginnings of a tangent.

Joe can only imagine the arguments they’ve had if Quynh has been suffering for as long as he thinks she has.

“I know _Andy,”_ Nicky whispers fiercely, Quynh’s hand a limp, delicate reminder of fury in his hand. “She doesn’t stop. She’s a machine, always moving forward all of the time and never stopping for anyone else.” 

He’s furious, more so than he was when Joe met him, all pent up energy and grief barely leashed. This isn’t about him though, which makes Nicky all the more angry, this is about _family._ The only family he has left, the only one that matters. 

“She stops for _you,_ Nicky.” Joe sits down at his side, smoothing his arm over his lover’s shoulder to pull him in close. Nicky is stiff but he doesn’t resist, he keeps his eyes firmly on Quynh. Joe knows that once Nicky looks Joe’s way he’ll break. 

“Did she not pick you up out of Genoa? Half-dead and terrified out of your mind. She loves you, in her own way. She loves Quynh, like an extension of herself. She would not put her in danger,” Joe says.

“Yes, she would.” Nicky’s learned even more into the heat of Joe’s arm, his chest. When he says this he says it small, like he’s ashamed as if he’s been holding it back. “She is consumed by the war. By all of it. She’s been fighting for too long.”

With his free hand, he waves at Quynh in the bed. “Why do you think she is like this? Pilots don’t seize for no reason. She’s sick. It’s probably the radiation.”

Joe suspected. They’ve all been briefed on it in training. The old film reels of the early pilots, in their nuclear-powered Jaegers, blood pouring from their nostrils when the cancer sets in. Wheezing in hospital beds while the doctors hover about their sickly forms, documenting it all, so that the next may pass more peacefully. 

No, so that the next pilot lasts longer.

“Andy didn’t force her,” Joe repeats. He’s sure. Nicky is only angered, terrified, he’s not thinking straight.

Nicky breathes in, his face a furrowed, stressful mess, only a second away from a tirade when Andy walks in.

Nile, who’d been sleeping, or carefully pretending to be, opens her eyes and sits up straighter in the hospital chair. 

When Nicky turns his head to Andy, all unleashed terror and disappointment and rage, the temperature of the room drops, the air stills. They stare at one another for a long, long moment. Joe has half a thought to grab a scalpel and stick himself between the two of them as some kind of protector-shield. They could absolutely go a few rounds together in the ring right now. 

“I’m sorry.” It’s clear and concise. From Andy. 

“For what?” Nicky growls, a warning in every syllable.

“For not telling you.” She says it to the room but she’s looking at Nicky, the water-logged, tossed away priest she plucked out of the sea into her god-machine, her Jaeger she’d piloted since the beginning, and shown him the world with. 

She goes to the opposite side of the bed. Smart, Nicky wouldn’t lunge at her with Quynh in the way. 

Andy brushes a long errant curl behind Quynh’s ear, lingering on the skin there. “The symptoms started to show a year ago.” She chuckles. “Though in all honesty, we’d expected them to show up sooner.” 

Then softer, like Andy doesn’t mean for them to hear it. “We’d expected it would happen to me.”

“You should have taken her out a year ago,” Nicky says.

“Maybe,” she concedes. “But Quynh wanted to fight. And I wanted to fight with her. Do not tell me you wouldn’t stand in your Jaeger with anyone else but him?”

Nicky flinches, he tries to lean out of Joe’s hold but Joe won’t let him. He feels it too. The heartbreak of choosing between the drift, spending every single moment in the closeness of your shared mind, and the comfort of love you can _feel,_ working, and shifting like polished gears between you.

Or taking the leisurely road, one of rest and contemplation, spending whatever little time you have left, the cancer gnawing at your lovers’ bones, and just trying to enjoy it all. 

There is a different kind of peace to both. And Joe is not sure which one he would choose. He knows Nicky is not sure either.

“This is not easy,” she says. She looks to Nile who’s stayed a quiet sentinel behind them all. “It will not be easy.”

“You’ll have to pilot with me now,” Nile says. She is sure-footed and the only one in the room who sounds confident in her decision.

“Yes, you will.”

It’s Quynh who says it. Nicky and Andy reach for her without thinking but she shakes them off, rising into a higher position on the bed so she can see them all.

“You’ll take care of my Andromache for me won’t you?”

“ _Quynh, no,”_ Andy pleads.

“Not yet, dear heart. I have a few fights in me yet, and we agreed that I would not die wasting away in a hospital bed smelling of bleach. But it is best to be prepared, no?” Quynh says with Andromache’s hand cradled to her cheek.

“Quynh,” Joe says, a little hesitant. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

She smiles at him, gentle, even as illness kills her she’s beautiful. 

“I’m dying, Yusuf. Allow me the choice of my departure.”

Her eyes flick over to Nicky and she exhales heavily. Nicky’s crying, not with any kind of sound, the tears trail down silently, in a clear torrent.

“The drift is not our forever, darling,” she says with a hand to Nicky’s wet cheek. “It may feel like it is, when you’re drowning in the sweetness of it, but there is always a price.”

“You cannot be the price,” Nicky spits out, his eyes bleeding fire.

“These are my dues Nicky.” Quynh looks to Joe, and in her, he sees himself. What they would both do for the people they love and fought for. “I will pay them gladly, should you and the world know peace.”

~

Joe and Nicky are placed higher in the lineup.

Behind the Australians and the Filipinos. No one dares to ask why Immortal Guard is not first on the ranking of Jaegers for deployment. Quynh disappears for a week when only a month before she’d been running around the Shatterdome, hale, and hearty as can be. Andy takes Nile to the sparring room, the simulations, and runs her through the drills until she’s drained dry. Joe and Nicky act as support to a limping Nile on the way to her dorm, and tuck her into bed, when she drops like a light.

They spend half their nights with Booker in the labs, helping him tear apart kaiju bones, kaiju hearts, even a brain once to Joe’s great disgust, in the hopes that it leads them somewhere. That they can stop the flow of time and what lies at the end of it, for Quynh, for them all. A coffin on the bottom of the ocean.

For the rest of their time, they spend tangled in each other. Latched in sleep, Joe’s steady breath at Nicky’s nape, nuzzling Nicky down from the spiked horrors of his nightmares. And then they are lost in one another, spending hours upon hours with their hands gripped tight to skin, their lips latched to the undersides of jaws, the plushness of lips. 

Joe pins Nicky down in the night, gasping prayers into the scattered constellations of moles down his chest, and fucks him until he screams rhapsodies to the air. In the morning Nicky will roll Joe over, smooth and slow, and draw a rhythm out with his hips, with his cock, so sweet that Joe comes with tears adorning his eyelashes like diamonds.

They are both sated and restless at the same time.

A kaiju comes, named Starscream, for its silver dotted hide, and the ear-shattering frequency of its cries and Twilight is deployed. Jupiter Storm and Cobra Green go first, but Andy isn’t satisfied with two Jaegers, especially when this kaiju shows up in Rio de Janeiro, and commits the Australian’s Jaeger to a watery grave.

And it’s an ocean jumper, one so large Booker spends the whole week after the kaiju’s death, locked in his lab just trying to work through the possibilities. 

When they drop this time, it's easier. They click in the drift as easily as veterans do, and Joe does not have to see Andy’s face to know her relief when it goes off without a hitch. 

The copters drop them five hundred feet from Rio’s shoreline where Starscream has left the wreckage of Jupiter Storm, descending upon the hills of the cities with the _favelas_ crumbling like colorful bursts of paint under its feet. 

They blow bright bursts of plasma at its feet to draw it away from Cobra Green, bearing the ringing, furious screech it throws their way along with the furied frenzy of its snapping jaws, just long enough for Cobra Green to recover, and come from behind with a sleek grab-kick to its vulnerable backside. 

Starscream falls into the misty green hills of Rio, dead, another soon to be carcass for people to pray and mourn under.

Joe and Nicky return to the Shatterdome exhausted, wounded, and happier than they’ve ever been before. Nile rushes to them through the clamor of the crowd and tugs them in for a tight hug.

“Never in my life,” she says. “Have I seen pilots click like that. Ever.”

Joe pulls her tighter in their little group hug and he looks at Nicky, a love-sick fool, when he says, “No one’s ever loved a person like I do him.”

Nicky gives Joe a playful headbutt, but his face says all the same and more.

Medical patches them up best they can, and when they get back to the dorms they limp into bed, beaten and bruised, a throbbing headache blooming between them both where the bridge in their minds should be.

They soothe it with their skin, sleeping bare and connected, not one part of Joe, not one part of Nicky, untouched by the other. 

When Joe sleeps he does so in darkness, with the weight of a battle well fought. Little does he know the alarms blare in Andy and Quynh’s room only three hours after he lays down, and another kaiju pops up on the radar, new, having come faster than any other ever has before.

  
  


~

Booker is pacing in tight little circles in the Command Room when they get there. Nile had come pounding on their door thirty minutes after she’d realized they hadn’t shown up to command.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck!” Booker curses, he’s playing with some fast-moving hologram above his touchpad, moving around what looks like a miniature diorama of the kaiju that just popped up. It’s slender, shaped like an eel but with large gripping forearms to propel it out of the water if need be. Its head tapers off into a pointed muzzle like that of a small lizard, when it’s mouth opens everything shines, star-like with thousands of tiny sharp teeth.

Nicky marches up to Copley immediately and grabs him by the collar, shaking him out of his seat at the monitor. 

“Why didn’t you wake us?” he barks at the man. “We should have been out there, not them!”

“You are both exhausted,” Copley says infuriatingly calm. “Andy and Quynh are the most capable pilots we have. They can do this.”

Joe moves so that he’s standing behind Nicky, not touching, but close enough that the man can tell that he’s there.

He’d like to throw a few swings of his own Copley’s way, but on the screen, the kaiju hones in on Tokyo. 

“I know they can.” Nicky says and lets him go. Copley rubs his hand over his neck where his collar pinched his skin, eyeing Nicky warily, “But they shouldn’t have to.”

Joe runs a gentle hand down Nicky’s flank. “You heard what Quynh said _hayati._ They have not rushed into this blindly.”

“I hate watching it,” Nicky admits.

Joe tugs him in close and kisses the side of his head. There is no reassurance he can offer, not in words. Nicky knows that they have to stay. They cannot go back to their bed and sleep all of this away into a nightmare. 

Copley has made himself front and center again before the screen. They have a bird’s eye view from the copters, on the back of the kaiju swimming just below the water’s surface, a rippling, glassy, green-blue flash of movement visible only from up high, and in the distance Immoral merging into a full-tilt sprint to catch it.

They have a view too of the inside of Immortal Guard, seeing what the pilots see, where Andy and Quynh are checking through the last of their hydraulics as they head into battle. 

“Goddamn it!” Booker slams something down on the table and comes over to where everyone’s standing at the front.

“Andy, Quynh. It will be too fast for you to catch,” he says. 

Andy’s voice comes through the speakers, tinny and gruff. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“I’m looking at its numbers right now, you are not _fast enough._ Immortal is Gen 1, it’s too heavy and this thing is slippery. It’s clocking in at 450 kilometers per hour, which should be impossible for its size. Damn it, listen to me, it’s moving too fast in the water you need to get it on _land.”_

There’s a pause. Then Quynh says, “You want us to bring this thing on land? The city isn’t evacuated yet.”

“It’s too late. Do it anyway. The city’s done either way.”

There’s no time to reply, the kaiju has reached the inlet of the bay where Tokyo gleams like a pearl on the end of a string. It pulls itself up out of the water with it’s forearms and slides onto the street. Its tail is eel-like, with a fringe running across the top and it whacks like a battering ram over the sea-walk. It clips a skyscraper, and glass rains down in the dark. 

Andy curses and doubles the power, the kaiju turns, alerted by the hissing of Immortal’s engines. It roars a warning and retreats into the city, leaving behind a carpet of ruin to follow.

Joe has a wild thought for a moment that everything is going to be okay, the kaiju can’t be that strong, it’s _retreating_. 

Then another one comes out of the water and crushes the head of Immortal Guard between its jaws.

~

Everything is done in flashes of time after that.

What Joe remembers before he and Nicky are strapped into Twilight is the absolute rage-induced scream Booker lets out at the sight of not one, but _two_ kaiju. Copley’s face drained, collapsing down into the chair, a hand over his mouth. How Nile pushes them both to the hangar bay, hollering at the top of her lungs for the mechanics, the gate-keepers, the maintenance workers to _move their asses we’re dropping Twilight down right now._

He remembers the drift settling in between him and Nicky and how unlike the first time it is not a calming blue balm to the soul, but it’s red and bloody and violent. And his hand twitches with the ache for a sword. 

Good thing he’s in one.

~

When they get to Immortal, sinking down under the weight of the new kaiju, the original kaiju, which Joe has heard referred to as Serpent over the coms, has circled back to meet its companion. 

It would be fascinating, and Joe is sure Booker is taking an exorbitant amount of notes if grief and fury weren’t sparking between him and Nicky’s drift. The kaiju seem to be communicating through some kind of flashing color pattern on their bodies.

It’s almost as if their _blood_ is simmering under their skin, as they watch each other’s hides flashing with bursts of intentful color. 

It’s enough of a distraction that when the two swords drop from Twilight’s fists the kaiju only have time to turn and greet its points.

~

When the swords form together, the world goes quiet. All Joe can see is the haze of the drift, at the end of it is Nicky. His face when he’s pinned down to the mat in the training rooms, how he looks when Joe gets the drop on him like he’s angry and proud and determined all at the same time. How his eyes flutter when Joe presses kisses to the smooth tautness of his abdomen. How he looks arched in the moonlight when he comes. 

He’s scowling, he’s beautiful, and through the drift, Joe knows Nicky sees him too. Joe in a thousand different faces, all of which he loves, and covets, and dies for. There is a millennia of love there, should they be able to grab it. 

Together they jump and cut the head of the second kaiju clean off, where it drops, and the water bursts into blue.

~

Of course, it's not over that easily.

Serpent is undeniably, and to the surprise of no one, upset over the loss of its companion with whom it has been putting on some kind of strange linguistic light show. It abandons the sinking Immortal Guard and turns to them, letting out a scratchy grinding screech.

Joe drops to a knee in the rig, Nicky does the same, they are one mind after all, and they swing out of the path Serpent propels itself in. 

“Heat the sword!” Nicky shouts and with his command the sword on their left bursts into a sizzling glow of orange where they then charge at Serpent, who is righting itself up again, and get a good clean hack at its shoulder where the skin sizzles and burns, sucking up all the blood that would have contaminated the bay.

Joe goes to activate the blade on the right but Serpent reacts quickly and gets its mouth around Twilight’s right fight, just to the side of the sword so that it isn’t punctured.

Joe groans with the weight, it’s dug in with its teeth and pulls down at them with all its weight, trying to drag them, drown them, and be _done_ with them. That’s what they are to these things, pawns on a chessboard to be swept away. 

Joe is not having it. 

He twists so that the elbow of Twilight faces outward to Serpent’s face, and initiates the elbow rocket to its face.

It doesn’t knock Serpent down, but he is stunned, he does hesitate, and with that and a roar of impending triumph rushing from Nicky in the drift the left arm of Twilight goes up and finds a home in the gut of the kaiju.

Joe counters with his own, and then Serpent is speared between the twinned blades of a Jaeger, crying, dying, dead.

~

There is a split half-second where they are happy watching it die, grinning like dogs, their teeth bared, and fogging up the visors of their drivesuits with their excitement sparking in reassuring _wewonwewon iloveyouiloveiloveyou’s_ across their minds in the drift.

Then Copley in their ears, “She’s sinking, no life signs on Quynh, Andy’s detached, someone get _over there—”_

Unbridled joy is not the way of the Jaeger.

~

When they get to the wreckage of Immortal Guard, sinking slowly into the bay. Andy is not in the cockpit but the water, screaming, diving down best she can, with one of her arms bloodied and busted. They pick her up as gently as they can but she beats her hands until they break on the metal knuckles of Twilight Sword.

“Andy. Andy. Please you’re hurt let us help. We’ll find her, we will,” Nicky is begging. His voice echoes across the bay in a helpless, doubtful plea.

Andy damns him in all the languages she knows, pushes at the metal with her one good arm until she collapses, and there she rests, broken, a ragdoll. They carry her back to the Shatterdome while the copters fly in above them, searchlight on the water as the sea swallows up the wreckage.

~

They find Quynh’s body five days later, pinned beneath one of Immortal’s ripped off fingers on the seabed, her hands crossed over her heart and her eyes pinned open, unseeing, and dark as the water is cold.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :(
> 
> Come check me out on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/1derspark)! (if you don't hate me too much rn) I'm accepting asks and prompts so please drop me one! Or just come and say hi <3
> 
> As always comments and kudos are appreciated and feed the beast!


	5. You can win.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’d sat there for hours, with the kaiju dead and bloody, Cobra Green and its pilots another casualty, the fatigue piling on and on in his chest.
> 
> The defeats hit harder now, with the end looming up ahead. The drift was not so sweet. It was a reminder now of the weight of the world they all bore. Joe didn’t want to deal with it anymore.
> 
> He held Nicky to his chest, and thought _please, no more._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I finished it? I actually finished? HOLY SHIT. 
> 
> I have not finished a WIP in years, but here we are, the end. And while it is by no means a perfect story, I'm glad that it's here. And I'm so grateful to everyone who has been reading and commenting along the way. You guys are awesome and I hope you know just how much you've motivated me :)
> 
> A BIGGGG thank you to kellin, who's looked over this behemoth of a story for me, who has been so kind. You are the absolute best, no one can compare <3
> 
> Enjoy everyone!

Andy doesn’t come to the funeral. 

Joe doesn’t blame her for it. 

Jaeger pilots, for the most part, don’t get them. There’s always too much to do. Another Jaeger to fit. Another monster to take down. Interviews to be had.

Most of the time a pilot’s family is gone, dead, or long banished from the mind. Your family becomes the people of the Shatterdome.

And there is one almost inevitable truth that all Jaeger pilots know, your funeral is often your last act in the cockpit. The final ferocious scream you give, that wondrous curtain-call before the water swallows you whole.

It is a warrior’s death, all gladiatorial. Savagery and mourning go hand in hand for them.

But Quynh was around longer than most Jaeger pilots. The press make some noise about her death, and Andy refuses to speak with them. So they organize a fair-sized ceremony full of the family Quynh had made around the globe at each Shatterdome, from the welders to the neuro technicians. They all pile onto the launching deck outside in Hong Kong and say a few words over the choppy gray water.

It’s nice, in a way. It feels like something that normal people would do. But fruitless still. 

The whole time Nicky has his eyes on the main hub, looking for Andy, his hand clenched tight on the fabric of Joe’s coat, his face tight and unshaven, mottled purple crescent moons formed thick under his eyes.

It’s been three days of harried and disjointed sleeping for them all, just waiting for the alarms to sound again for more kaiju. One, two,  _ three  _ of them.

Joe holds Nicky close at night, curled in tight around his back, and runs a soothing hand down his side in the hopes that he’ll catch an hour, thirty minutes maybe, of rest. 

But Nicky is tense, and there is nothing Joe can do to ease it. He can only lay there with him, as a reminder, that he is not alone, even when the world continues to take more and more from him.

After the funeral, Joe follows Nicky inside the Dome, presumably to the training room to spar. He’s taken to even more hours practicing with the sword following Quynh’s death as if the constant drilling would bring her back.

But he stops Joe with a soft touch to the chest when he moves to follow Nicky down the hallway. Nicky’s eyes are kind but firm. “I need to see Booker. Alone, please.”

Oh, that stings. It really does. Some primal, possessive part of Joe that’s still writhing about from all the death that clings desperately to the air, like some unrepentant stink, wants to ask  _ Why? Do not leave my sight, hayati. What do you need that I cannot give you? Let me help you.  _

But damn it, Joe knows better. Nicky is many things but he is not a liar, and his heart is bared to one man in the world, of which Joe is the grateful recipient. It is only that somedays Nicky needs to stew alone, quiet and pensive. 

With Booker, Nicky will probably drink and rant, and no one does it better than the Frenchman.

“Alright,” Joe says. He tugs Nicky in by the waist and kisses him softly. Nicky hums, presses into him, and parts from their embrace with softer, less haunted eyes. He walks into the labyrinth of the Shatterdome and leaves Joe behind.

Luckily Joe does not have to stand there long, pining. Nile comes to him looking as tired and worn-down as everyone else, but there’s something frantic in her face. She’s jittery, she holds the golden cross at her neck in a death-grip.

“Yusuf,” she says, which is an alarm in itself. She rarely ever uses his full name. “no one can find Andy.”

Joe, for one second, has the thought to check at the bottom of the ocean but he blinks that away with the dark smoky tendril of fear it inspires. That is not Andromache, but then again, is the woman who survived two of her partner’s deaths, beaten down by the brutality of the kaiju, even human anymore?

She’s something. Joe will find out what.

“Where could she be?” Nile asks him.

Joe thinks of the crazed mess Andy was in the palm of Twilight’s hand, watching her break apart and shatter. He thinks of her with Nicky, a gentle hand to his shoulder at dinnertime, all the love she won’t say out loud in her gestures. 

He thinks of Hong Kong, a carcass cleaned open by kaiju and stitched back up so that it may lumber on.

He knows.

~ 

He is glad, later, that Nicky is not with him when they find her. 

Andy’s arms are strung over the railing by the sea, overlooking the same spot where she had taken Joe and Nicky before, to Lykon’s unmarked grave in the water. Now Quynh’s. 

She has a bottle of what Joe assumes was some street-level shitty moonshine, grains of something sticking to the bottom of the glass, her head rests on her arms, her hair is dank and stuck together in sweat.

She doesn’t look up when they approach, though she’s aware that they’ve come.

She throws the empty bottle their way, and it shatters at their feet.

Nile yelps and jumps. Joe grabs her by the arm and they both take a few slow steps back.

Even drunk, Andy is a better shot than most of them. She wasn’t aiming for them specifically, he’s ninety-percent sure. Maybe eighty-five. Either way, they’re not getting closer.

“I’m not drifting with anyone,” Andy says. She’s not slurring, there’s no indication that she's spent the last night holed up in the seediest parts of Hong Kong drinking her grief away. She is in fact, very succinct about it. Her clarity makes her more frightening.

If Nicky were here he’d provoke her, like he usually does. Joe is not so sure that’s something he could do, Andy only tolerates it because it's Nicky. She’d probably pick up a piece of the glass with her bare hand and have it at his throat. No hesitation, the blood dripping down her hand unnoticed, dismissed in her fury.

“We didn’t come here for that,” Nile says.

“Oh yeah?” Andy looks over her shoulder, the stormy-blue of her eyes barely visible under the sticky fringe of her air. “What else would you need me for?”

“Must we have a reason to need you?” Joe says. “There are no strings attached here.”

Andy chuckles, low, dark, cruel. 

“We are Jaeger pilots Joe. Everything we do comes with strings attached.” She pauses, kicks leisurely at the bottom of the railing. “I should be dead. But Quynh is dead. Lykon is dead. Too many are dead. It will not be long before those strings take you too.

“Or maybe you will be like me Joe, stuck here while Nicky rots at the bottom of the sea.”

“Stop it,” Joe snaps at her. He is too frayed, the fight is too fresh in his mind to hear such things. He’d dreamed them himself far too often over the past few days.

Andy was smiling, but it was cruel. She knew his fears, they were her own. Except for her they were realized.

“Better you accept that now, it’ll spare you some pain later.”

“No it won’t,” Joe says fiercely. ‘Nothing would prepare me for that. And no one should bear it.” He takes a hesitant step forward, watching Andy for any sign of movement. She wouldn’t hurt him too badly, but he wouldn’t put it past her to do a little maiming right now.

“I am sorry that you have to. But what is this going to do?” He gestures at the sparkle of shattered glass on the ground, the general mess of Andy’s form.

“Nothing,” Andy says. “it does nothing. But I don’t care.”

“You care about Nicky,” Joe says, his voice edging on sharp. “I’d like to think you care about me. Booker. Nile. You would leave us for the crows?”

Andy is silent, eyes flitting between Joe and Nile, who’s come up beside him.

Nile smiles at her. It’s kind, and her eyes shine clear. 

“You want to rest,” Nile says. “you can. After we’re done blasting the bastards back to hell. I don’t think you’re the type to drink your sorrows away Andromache. Wouldn’t you rather hit something instead?”

Andy’s jaw clenches. “I’m not fit for the Jaeger. You couldn’t handle me, Nile.”

Nile snorts. She turns like she’s leaving and says to them both over her shoulder, “You don’t know what I can handle. I can certainly handle you.”

~

Nicky runs to their helicopter when they descend back down on the Shatterdome. He runs to Joe and takes both of his hands in his own, squeezing tight. 

“Booker found something,” Nicky whispers breathlessly, the beginnings of a genuinely pleased smile on his face.

When he looks behind Joe to where Andy and Nile are coming off the copter, conversing amongst themselves in low hushed tones, his face becomes even brighter.

He leans in to kiss Joe, quick and firm, pulling away too fast for Joe’s liking, but he lingers and pushes their foreheads together.

“We’re going to win this,” he says, assuredly, beautiful and bold, the surest Joe’s ever seen him.

~

Booker holds what looks like two long, glowing holographic lines in his palms. His eyes are red-rimmed, Joe is a hundred percent sure that the coffee he’s drinking is spiked with scotch, and his lab is an absolute warzone, complete with dozens of loose pieces of scrap paper and the bloody entrails of a kaiju littering the floor.

“Say that again?” Nile asks Booker, eyeing him with no small amount of suspicion.

Booker sighs. 

“Okay. The Breach is in the Mariana Trench, we all know that. That’s why we’re stuck in this godforsaken dome because the portal where most of those fuckers come from is just two thousand miles east of here.”

“Yes Booker, we’ve all been pilot trained, get on with it,” Andy drawls.

He shoots her a glare but goes on. “That’s the only route of theirs we’ve been able to pick up on. So how the hell have they been turning up in the Mediterranean? The Atlantic and Indian Oceans?”

He enlarges one of the neon lines from the hologram, and Joe can see that it’s a blown-up picture of the trench, or at least the lines that they know of. 

“I sent a team down there the other day in the sub with some kaiju blood,” he says. 

“You did what?” Joe shouts, staring at Booker wide-eyed. “Why in the hell would you do that?”

“Yusuf,” Nicky’s hand goes to the small of his back. “there’s a reason, let him speak.”

“I wouldn’t put that toxic shit into the ocean if I didn’t have a good reason,” Booker says, his chin held high. “but I noticed something months ago.”

He waves at one of the many holographic screens hovering in the lab, and on it comes a world map, with patches of blue shaded in on certain coastlines of the continents. Bright spots bloom over spaces where a kaiju was killed, but there are smatterings of the color in places far away. A long plume across the top of the Antarctic, some spattering up at the top of Norway, a suspicious trail on the eastern edge of the Mediterranean near Turkey.

Booker points at these spots. “The kaiju blue showed up in the water, in smaller, but not insignificant amounts in these places not too long after a kaiju showed up somewhere else in the region. But the kaiju kills were never close enough, and the currents in the area couldn’t have carried the blood that far.”

“So they got there by some other means,” Nile reasons.

“By these.” The hologram of the trench lines light up even brighter and Joe can see how they merge off from the Breach, through the  _ Earth  _ somehow, and end up in the inner oceans and seas.

“They’ve made more portals,” Booker says. “that stretch out from the main one to anywhere else they please on the planet.”

“You found this out with kaiju blood?” Andy asks. She sounds interested now.

“I had my suspicions,” Booker says. “When the sub team let the blood lose the other day I tracked it. I’d mixed the blood with some Earth contaminants, and a couple of days later the blood turned up in New York, but  _ only  _ the blood.”

The solution burns big and bright in Joe’s mind. 

“Because the blood is the only thing that can go through the portals. Only the  _ kaiju  _ can use the portals,” he says. 

“That’s why we haven’t been able to see how they move around!” Joe grabs Nicky by the face when he says it, basks in his laughter, then goes to Booker and hugs the man tight as he can.

“You mad fucking genius,” he says. “Now we can see where the portals are. We can  _ stop  _ them.”

“Joe.” It’s Andy. She looks grave still, even with this newfound information. “Even if we found the portals, what can we even do to them? We can’t exactly plug them up.”

“No,” says Nicky. “but we can blow them to hell.”

He points at one of the holograms on a table in the center of the lab, where it rises up with a wave of his hand. The Breach, at least what Joe thinks is an approximation of it, forms under his hands.

“The Breach is their base. The only portal we need to focus on destroying. The paths to the other seas we can use to our advantage. We’ll sneak in through one of the portals to the center and bomb it with a reactor.”

“A reactor? You mean the nuclear core?” Nile asks. “The nukes barely did anything to the kaiju when this all started, what makes you think it’ll help us now?”

“Because we’re bombing the Breach, not the kaiju. It’s atomic in nature,” Booker says. He pulls up a bright colored holographic ball in his hand and drops it at the top of the Breach where it funnels down to the center and implodes, sending the whole thing shattering, gone. “and if we can get a nuclear core down to the center where it’s electromagnetic energy is weakest, there’s a chance it will destabilize and break apart.”

He grins, and Booker grinning is a sight, spreads his arms wide and says, “No more kaiju.”

“But Twilight and Cobra are electrically powered,” Nile adds, somewhat hesitantly. “Immortal was the only one who had a nuclear core.”

“Please,” Andy interrupts her. Her face has lost that plain sense of fragility it had only moments before, the demise she believed waited for them plain for all to see. 

There is something like determination on her features now.

“The Immortal Guard doesn’t go down that easy. I’ll fish her out of the ocean myself.” She turns to Booker. “You’re absolutely fucking crazy. But damn it if we don’t try. Quynh would want me to try. Let’s blast the bastards back to hell.”

~

There’s no other mad scientist in the Dome with Booker’s reputation or clout, and Copley, who’s spent the last few days running on no more than an hour of sleep here or there, takes to their plan before they’re even finished explaining it.

He calls in for a dozen extra freighters to join what looks like a small armada already fishing out Jaeger parts just off of Tokyo. What would have taken a month, gets done in four days. And Joe watches a crane pluck out a rounded nuclear core from Immortal’s chestplate from the safety of the shore with Nicky warm at his side. It’s taken like a miner carves out stones, and Joe watches the helicopters tow it home, back to base with a hundred other water-stained Jaeger parts. Their hope spread out in metal, in reconstruction, time a whip at their backs.

~

A kaiju comes while they’re rebuilding.

Booker says they’re lucky it wasn’t two. But in all honesty, Joe thinks two might have been better. This one garners a new category, and fuck does he hate Category Fives.

It comes to the northern coast of Australia, right outside of Darwin. The city is sparsely populated, and would scarcely be considered a city by other standards, but it’s the hub of the Northern Territory, and 150,000 lives can still be 150,000 lives lost. 

Twilight and Cobra go in, the last two functioning Jaegers, and they get  _ pummeled. _

Joe was there for the construction of their Jaeger, he watched as Twilight was outfitted for speed, and sleekness, power in the arms for the swinging of their swords. She was a beast. Cobra Green was even faster, the Filipino sisters who drove it were whip quick in their martial arts, and he’s seen them outmaneuver many kaiju, with barely a sweat broken on their brow.

It didn’t seem to matter here. This kaiju, named Panther, could outrun them all.

Its body was unmistakably feline, with the powerful haunches and wide grasping paws to cover distance with power. But its head was dragon-like,  with tusks protruding out of its bottom lip like a boar , when it swung its head, whatever it hit came crashing down.

Cobra came running and Panther sent it flying.

Joe and Nicky had no time to rescue them, Panther was on them before Joe could even blink, and it was only with a frantic swipe of Nicky’s sword from the left, clipping it in the neck after a long hour of back and forth fighting, was Panther wounded enough to slow down so they could kill it.

They practically collapsed in the rig. Joe unhooked himself, and stumbled over to Nicky who had fallen out of the wires cradling his left arm to his chest, taking in deep, ragged breaths.

Joe had dragged him in close. The copters would have to come and carry them back, there was no way they were walking back to Hong Kong on their own.

They’d sat there for hours, with the kaiju dead and bloody, Cobra Green and its pilots another casualty, the fatigue piling on and on in his chest.

The defeats hit harder now, with the end looming up ahead. The drift was not so sweet. It was a reminder now of the weight of the world they all bore. Joe didn’t want to deal with it anymore.

He held Nicky to his chest, and thought  _ please, no more.  _

~

Nicky’s arm is dislocated and broken in three places. He doesn’t scream when the medics pop it back into place, his breath hitches and his forehead presses just that much harder into Joe’s shoulder. 

They take him into surgery after, the orthopedic surgeon promises Joe it won’t take long, an hour max. 

But Joe sits, his body bruised, one large line of stitches on his forehead from a particularly hard blow in the Jaeger, and tries not to cry.

Andy comes ten minutes in and sits by his side without a word.

Only when the doctor comes out and tells them that everything is okay does she speak.

“Immortal is ready,” she says to Joe, whose head is hanging between his knees, shaking with a kind of relief and rage he cannot express.

Andy is not one for comfort, to give or receive it. But she lays a gentle hand on his shoulder anyway. 

“This will be over soon,” she says. 

“You mean we’ll be dead soon.”

“Maybe.” There is no lie in her answer. “But I will do my best to make sure that doesn’t happen. You and Nicky deserve better than this. You deserve an after.”

He wants it. He wants some peace. A house on a cliff, not far from the sea, but enough of a distance that he doesn’t have to look at it every day. Nicky in his bed in the mornings, soft and warm, and beautiful as all heaven. Waking up without an ache in his bones, and a monster on the horizon. The drift faded to memory in his mind, addictive but tempered, and only to be opened on anniversaries and days where Nicky’s touch isn’t enough.

But he is not the only one still fighting.

“And you don’t deserve it?” he asks Andy.

“I do.” She stands, beckons him forward. “But I was never the retirement type.”

~

Nile looks like a god in her drivesuit.

The new Immortal Guard is a sleek black behemoth of a thing. And the drivesuits had been reconstructed accordingly. Joe watches her and Andy stride into the docking bay of the Dome and feels the tingling apprehension in his chest, settling down to rest.

There is so much that he fears. Failing, and dying. Leaving Nicky alone. Being alone  _ himself.  _ He is of the mind that they will go together or not at all. He will not be Andromache, clinging to the wreckage of a Jaeger, wailing into the night and the rain. 

But he does not wish to go on fighting either, the dream of his and Nicky’s home on a cliff is bright in his mind. He’s almost ashamed to think of it, pilot’s don’t get happily ever afters. But the world was ending anyway, carved out with a dozen secret tunnels rife with monsters, so he could do little else but hope, and dream.

Seeing Nile, Joe dreams just a little harder.

“You look fierce,” Nicky says to her, beaming. 

“I have to be,” she responds. She playfully shoves her shoulder at Andy. “Especially to deal with this one.”

“I’m the one who has to drive with a rookie,” Andy shoots back, but it's all in jest. They would drive together well.

The Dome is a buzz of activity, on one of the holo-boards on the wall there are a dozen blinking lights over the many portals Booker had discovered, and one by one they blink out. Another bomb detonated, and another portal closed. Until there is only one tunnel to the Breach, where they will fight through, then down to where no man could ever reach, where Immortal and her core would be enough.

Joe looks up to the Jaegers. Polished, fitted to the brim.

“Should we give a speech?” he asks, eyeing Andy.

“There is nothing I could say you don’t already know,” she says calmly.

But she cocks her head, contemplating. “Stay alive. And if you can’t do that, make it a good death.”

Nicky snorts and Nile rolls her eyes. Andy throws a hand behind Nile’s head and squeezes. They walk to the elevator together, warriors in armor, a four-person battalion at the ready.

~

When Immortal and Twilight are dropped at the portal in the eastern Mediterranean, just beyond the shores of Turkey, the copters come in and drop a hundred thousand gallons worth of kaiju blood on their armor. 

There's a small fleet of environmental teams circled around them to collect up the excess best they can.

Joe would think the cost too high, the planet and its people have already paid so much, but when they slip down to the seafloor and flow seamlessly through the red-blue crackling mess of the portal, he thinks the price is just enough.

And as they settle into the long tunnel to the Breach, Nicky’s mind echoes the sentiment back at him, this price is fair, and they would both gladly pay it.

~

The portal down to the Breach is long and winding, carved along the canyons and crevices of the ocean. Joe can barely see even with the many lights hitched to Twilight’s head and chest.

They’re in front, with Andy and Nile taking up the rear. So far there have been no mishaps between them in the drift. 

The further on they walk the brighter it gets, it takes them about an hour before reaching a long slash in the floor, which must be twenty miles wide, crackling with constant electricity and bigger than any of the other portals they’ve seen. The Breach.

“Immortal, fan-out, the Breach is in sight, you need to move forward to proceed,” Copley orders over the com.

“We’re coming,” Nile says. “Hold on, there’s movement.”

Something rumbles. Nile screams over the coms and Twilight is bowled over. 

Joe gasps with the impact, and Nicky is the first between them to right himself. He pushes encouragement at Joe through the drift and together they settle, locking legs in the hard rock of the seafloor, just in time to raise their fists at the incoming kaiju who batters at them head on and shoves them back into a trench wall.

“Swords drop!” Joe yells and then raises his right arm up with the freshly formed blade to the kaiju’s face.

It screeches, and together Joe and Nicky reach down with their left arm to get at its belly. They cut in, but the kaiju shifts, and the gash isn’t deep enough so the beast recovers quickly. As Twilight turns from the wall to a more open space the kaiju catches sight of the sprinting form of Immortal making a break for the Breach. 

It launches off towards them, but Joe and Nicky are faster. They retract the sword in Twilight’s right hand and grab for its tail, a long grasping sort of thing and hunker down into the ground, holding it back.

There’s a great creaking sound in the rig from the stress, Joe grits his teeth trying to hold on and groans through the pain in his shoulders. 

“Go!” Joe screams at Nicky. “Cut it down now!”

Nicky moves the sword up, the end of it all within their sights when a claw comes out from behind and snaps the sword in half.

Nicky screams, and they fly forward in the rig as Twilight is bowled over once more, rolling down the trench further to the Breach, where Joe watches the second kaiju leap forward to a waiting Immortal who pounds her fists together for an attack.

An alarm sounds, and there’s a flashing red light in Twilight’s head. There’s been an exterior breach, somewhere in the Jaeger water is leaking in, and Joe and Nicky will drown in under seven minutes. 

They still have their kaiju to take care of.

With one sword left, holes in their rig, and water lapping at Joe’s ankles they charge forward without even a second thought. This is what they came for, the Breach, the fight, the last stand. Joe raises his right hand, Nicky raises his right hand, and their last sword comes up to crash together with the kaiju’s jaws.

It groans between its teeth, the metal’s going to  _ break,  _ Joe can feel it giving, and instinctively he raises his left to counter some of the pressure but that sword is  _ gone.  _ Twilight’s left hand is a mangled mess of wires and broken pieces of metal.

The pressure comes on harder.

_ “I’m sorry,” Joe thinks at Nicky through the drift. “I’m sorry we didn’t have longer. My love, I would spend a thousand years loving you.. It’s what you deserve. You deserve it all and you deserve more. I love you. I love you and I fight with you. You are my sword, my partner, I will go out from this world only should you come with me.” _

_ “Joe,” Nicky shoots back, smooth and warm and wrapped in the closeness of the drift. “please amore, I would love you a thousand more. This is not the end. It is not the end.” _

Joe can feel Nicky shift his arm, how it falls deeper into the kaiju’s throat, back to the fleshiness of it, where the sword tears. It brings the kaiju closer even as it rips it apart from the inside.

Nicky straightens himself out and Joe can only watch in awe, and then follow as he jumps up through the unrelenting weight of the water, the sharpness of the kaiju’s teeth, and plunge the sword down its throat. 

It doesn’t even scream. But it does die, and fall, right onto the crumbling remains of Twilight, pinning them to the floor, with the water rushing in and the Breach still pulsing ahead of them. Immortal Guard locked in a battle with another one of its creations, just one step away from victory.

~

The water’s pouring in, Nicky’s screaming at him to move _ ,  _ Twilight is  _ done  _ and Joe can’t tell where Immortal even is let alone which way is up. 

He’s hit his head badly, the stitches from his previous wound reopened, and there’s blood trickling down into his eye. Whenever he blinks the world tips sideways in a blurry haze.

The kaiju is crushing them, the weight of it pushing down at the legs, the pressure is building up with the water up to their knees now.

“Joe  _ move! _ ”

Nicky is mostly carrying him, and he tries so hard. Joe takes what he thinks is a couple of steps towards the escape pods, but he falls.

“Fuck, fuck, Jesus Christ,” Nicky is mumbling under his breath.

“Nicolo—” Joe slurs and tries to reach for him. His head throbs in a way that’s lulling him to sleep, but he doesn’t want to, he wants to stay. Nicky pushes him until he’s flat in the pod and Joe tries to pull him in.

“This one’s for you  _ tesoro _ ,” Nicky says with a hard kiss to the temple. “I’m following you, I promise.”

There’s a hiss and the pod screen closes over him. Nicky falls out of Joe’s vision and back into the Jaeger where the rushing water roars up to his chest. 

Joe pushes at the screen, groans something out, a plea maybe, but the pod’s already bursting out and away, it rises to the surface and breaches into the air where the water is calm and not a Jaeger to be seen.

~

Joe fades in and out of consciousness. For a while, he thinks. 

He remembers it in bits and pieces. One of Copley’s boats comes and fishes him out of the water. Someone shines a light in his eyes. He calls for Nicky, gets nothing back.

He wakes up and elbows Booker in the face.

“Stay down Joe! You’re concussed, hold on—”

“Where is  _ Nicky?”  _ Joe has a hand on Booker’s throat. He’s breathing heavy, he’s still wet, the drivesuit still on. He moves to stand and almost falls over with its weight.

Booker rips himself away and holds up his hands in surrender. 

He points to the ladder on the side of the boat, where a member of the medteam pulls up a purple-armored arm, and Nicky steps onto the deck, dripping, exhausted, his eyes wild until they land on Joe. 

He runs to Joe, because in all honesty, Joe can’t stand too well right now let alone walk, and falls into his arms.

He’s babbling in Italian, in Arabic, pressing kisses everywhere he can reach. Joe just takes it in, squeezes back as much as he dares, the pounding in his head is making it hard for him to move, and he just wants to go to sleep but Nicky is in his arms, safe and whole and not all what he expected when they’d thundered down through the portals to save the world.

He makes a whining sound into Nicky’s hair and no one begrudges him for it, Nicky’s crying too he thinks. They’re a mess, but they’re together.

Booker and the medteam eventually pry them apart, forcing Joe to lay back down, Nicky sits down at his side, running his hands gently through his hair. 

Nicky keeps looking over the bow of the boat, his lip caught between his teeth, and before Joe asks him what’s wrong Nicky gasps, and the boat—no, the whole ocean rumbles.

Something exploded. Booker is running his fingers frantically over a touchpad, eyes skimming over some readings.

“They did it,” Booker breathes out.

When he looks up from the pad, he’s crying, but it’s through a smile. And then the boat erupts into cheering.

Nicky sobs, dropping his face into the crook of Joe’s neck. Joe reaches up to grab at him, thanking and praying through his tears. The boats celebrate, but no one has said where Immortal, or her crew is.

He doesn’t have to wait long for the answer.

Booker stands and runs to the ladder where a mob of people has formed, waving down at someone in the water. Joe watches with a thundering heart as Booker reaches down to haul Andy and Nile up. They’re unharmed, grinning, a mob of screaming, hollering dome workers at their sides.

Nicky lets out a kind of snorting, hysterical laugh, screaming out some excited phrase in Italian. And Joe, well, all he can do is tremble with the joy of it.

The medteam herds the two women over until all four Jaeger pilots are crouched down together on the deck. Andy sits down at Nicky’s side, pulling him into a tight hug, Nile settles at Joe’s and tangles their hands together. 

They lean into one another, while they’re fussed over, Booker shouting orders at the boat captains. The boats rev up and drive away, full speed on the water.

Joe, who has laid himself down in the cradle of Nicky’s lap, the love of his life smiling down at him and humming a soft comforting lullaby, feels for the first time in years, light and unburdened, the sea nothing to him but a vessel to carry him home.

  
  


~

  
  


SIX MONTHS LATER

  
  


~

  
  


Down by the sea coves on one of Malta’s many beaches, there is a staircase carved into the walls of the cliff. At the top of this staircase is a house. One bedroom with an unmade bed. White stucco for the outside, warm tiled floors, and walls painted the color of dusk.

There are paintings on the wall. Landscapes of the ocean’s horizon just before the sun goes down. Schematics of what once were Jaegers. Photos of pilots in dark chrome drivesuits. An unhealthy amount of portraits, by the same artist, of Nicolo di Genova.

It’s a loved home. There’s a garden outside, and a lemon tree hanging full and green before the porch. 

It’s occupants spend many days in this house, tangled in cream-colored bed sheets with nothing to do but laze there and love one another.

Today they play about in the surf of the sea with their family while one former Jaeger pilot, the scourge of her generation, and the last one standing, Andromache the Scythian watches.

She stands, odd and tall by the staircase in the cliffside, her legs covered by the windy rush of seagrass, smiling.

It’s a sunny day, clear and bright, when she breathes in, the air is fresh. 

Down in the water, Joe lifts Nicky by the legs and hauls him over the shoulder screaming and laughing while the seafoam licks at their ankles. Booker hollers at them and does his best to get Nicky down. Nile floats around them all on light feet, laughing up a storm and getting it on camera with her phone.

Andy watches them and thinks she has not seen such happiness in years. She thinks it was a shame that they were all denied it for so long.

She raises her head to the sky in thought, maybe even thanks for the blessing, and goes down to join them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I think this will be my last big fic for a while, I do need to recharge and college is a beast, but stay tuned for some cute one-shots I have coming up! My WIP folder is very full of fun TOG ideas. 
> 
> A huge thank you again to everyone who subscribed and read this fic, I hope I did TOG and Pacific Rim justice. 
> 
> Come check me out on [tumblr](https://www.tumblr.com/blog/1derspark)! I'm taking asks and prompts at the moment so drop me something! Or just come and say hi :)
> 
> And as always comments and kudos are appreciated and feed the beast!


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